


New Management

by MindfulWrath



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Gen, Post-Serial: s121 Earthshock, Serial: s121 Earthshock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-01-13 13:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 28,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1227283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MindfulWrath/pseuds/MindfulWrath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just as the freighter is about to crash into Earth, Adric is rescued- but not by the Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rescue

Earth loomed ahead, the most beautiful and terrible thing he had ever seen, its oceans sapphire blue, its land emerald green and desert tan, its poles brilliant with thousands of tons of ice, and pale white clouds dancing in the thin bluish haze of its atmosphere. And in a few short minutes, it would all be so much dust and fire.  
He turned his eyes to the controls, watching the numbers and codes swim across the screens as his fingers flew, trying to shut out the incessant and escalating whine of the antimatter stabiliser as its load propelled the ship towards the helpless primeval Earth; code after code, solution after solution his mind supplied to him, but none were right, not one of them halted Earth's slow advance or lessened the failing whine of the stabiliser.  
With a sharp cry of disgust he turned from the banks, twining his fingers together in the hopes that the contact would drive the fruitless codes from his vision and reveal the true answer lurking beneath—and the stabiliser whined and Earth grew nearer, and time ran like water through his fingers.  
"Something's missing. There's something I've forgotten." he muttered to himself. "But maybe. . . ." A sea of numbers parted to reveal the ocean floor, the path to salvation—he whipped around and typed as fast as his fingers could, muttering the final computations beneath his breath, saving the world by inches and degrees, only a few final computations away—  
And the console exploded.  
He leapt backward, looking for the cause of the disturbance; to his right, a Cyberman spent its last iota of power howling as it died, as it stumbled and fell, its gun dropping with a sharp clatter to the floor. Even death could not stir him now. Fingers smarting from plastic shrapnel, he turned back to the console—smoking, ruinous, melted and blasted—useless. All the life drained from him, as though it didn't want to hang on those last few minutes and be forcefully removed by the impending massive collision. His lighted eyes dulled, his shoulders slumped, the tight set of his mouth faltered and fell away.  
"Well," he said, looking up to see Earth now rushing towards him at impossible speeds, "now I'll never know if I was right."  
The antimatter engines screamed and wailed, and Adric loosed his long-dead brother's belt from around his waist, holding it to his chest as the last bastion of comfort in a world that was suddenly and unexpectedly falling apart. He should have gone home, should never have gotten himself into this mess, should have listened all those times when the Doctor told him to stay behind—he shouldn't have stowed away on the TARDIS at all. He had failed—he had tried, and he had failed. Failed the crew, failed those Earth-soldiers, failed Earth, failed Tegan and Nyssa, and, worst of all, he had failed the Doctor. He should have left with the crew, should have let the door close—the very least he could have done was come through on his promise to come back, but even that was impossible now; the very least of consolations was already far beyond his reach. All he could do was wait, stand and watch Earth approach, knowing that they would destroy each other. . . .  
Another sound, faint at first, slipped in behind the overwhelming scream of the engines, a familiar sound, rhythmic and soothing, the screeching of the TARDIS materialising.  
Adric was running before he even realised he'd heard the sound at all, leaping through the open door and hearing it slam shut behind him, and then the screeching of time and space bending out of the way as the TARDIS departed the doomed ship. "I'm sorry." he gasped, pulling himself from the floor, every muscle in his body shaking violently, tears longing to spill over his eyelids. "I tried, but I couldn't get the last code. A Cyberman shot out the controls. I'm so sorry, I failed you, I failed everyone. . . ."  
"No need to apologise, Adric. Earth is really in no danger at all."  
Terror turned his bones to water, squeezed his heart and filled his lungs, cast blackness before his eyes and clenched his throat in its hands. That voice was not the Doctor's, and there was only one other Timelord he knew of who still traveled this universe in a TARDIS.  
"Expecting the Doctor, were you? No, your precious Doctor wouldn't risk his ship to save you. Come, sit down, you're looking pale."  
"No," Adric stammered, frozen in horror. A strong, gloved hand grasped his arm and led him to a seat, where it placed him. He couldn't bring himself to look at the face, not that face; as long as he didn't look, maybe it wasn't real.  
"But not me. I'm far too fond of your astounding mind to let you go to waste. Still hesitant about joining me?"  
"Never," he croaked, staring at the gold embroidery on the black vest before him. He didn't even need to look at the face. He knew it well enough.  
"My dear boy, I just saved your life. A little gratitude wouldn't hurt, you know."  
"I'd rather be dead!" Adric cried, leaping to his feet—or trying to. The hand was still on his arm, and it was unimaginably strong, forcing him back into the chair with very little apparent effort.  
"I understand the sentiment, but no. I've gone to quite a lot of effort to keep you alive."  
He struggled, knowing it was stupid and futile, knowing it could only possibly make things worse—but the part of him that knew things and the part that was fighting the iron grip were in different places, and no longer speaking to one another. So he lashed out, punched and kicked, dragged himself from the chair, screamed and scratched, bit the hand that covered his mouth until blood flooded in between his teeth and stung his tongue with its bitterness.  
But then the Master hit back.  
The first blow shattered two of his ribs; he felt them snap like dry twigs just before a terrible white-hot pain flooded from the breach and filled his side. Adric screamed, and the hand that had been clenched in his teeth curled into a fist and punched his throat, silencing him instantly. He fell to the floor when the Master dropped him, choking on his own windpipe, gasping for air, burning up on the inside from the pain of his broken ribs. Just for good measure, the Master kicked him in the head, and right after the pain flared to life, everything went dark.


	2. The Master

When Adric woke up, he thought for a moment that he must still be unconscious because it was so terribly dark—then he noticed the logical fallacy inherent in this reasoning and decided it was just very dark. Then he remembered he could open his eyes. What he saw was entirely unexpected.

Before him stood a woman in her early twenties, with bobbed mousy brown hair, tea-coloured eyes, and a smirk, looking up at him with no small amount of amusement, her hands clasped behind her back in a gesture that conveyed both innocence and the feeling that she was hiding something potentially dangerous behind her back.

"Who. . . ?" Adric began, and his broken ribs decided to remind him of their unhappy state, and his injured throat seized up and turned his words into a truncated cough, which caused his ribs to submit further protest and his injured head to smart. The woman grinned.

"You'd think, wouldn't you, that after the beating I gave you, you'd remember who I am." She shook her head in a mockery of disappointment. "Mathematical genius you may be, but in all other respects you're a complete idiot."

Adric tried to speak again, but the pain in his side was growing worse by the moment, and all he managed was a soft gasp of pain. The woman gasped and adopted the patronising tone and face used to speak to babies and dogs.

"Aw, poor boy! Does it hurt much? You poor little thing, that's why we don't bite, you see? It makes the Master very angry, you see." She took a hand from behind her back and displayed the bloody toothmarks thereupon. "You got nothing less than you deserved, you wretched little creature. Maybe it'll teach you to keep your teeth to yourself."

That was it then, the final proof: this woman was the Master.

"But you're a _girl!_ " Adric gasped, his own voice sounding childish in his ringing ears. The Master laughed, throwing her head back and cackling.

"Well _spotted!_ " she cried, when she could speak past her amusement. "What was your first clue?"

"That's impossible. . . ." He would have said more, but his ribs seemed swollen with pain, pouring it out into his body faster than it could drain away.

"Obviously it's not. Just improbable. Trust me, you're no more surprised than I was."

"How?"

"Oh, well, you know, once you exceed the natural number of regenerations, everything starts going haywire. I'm rather enjoying myself."

This was too much for Adric. The floodgates that had been keeping his mind free of his body's pain burst, and the last thing he heard before the darkness swallowed him was a noise of disgust and the words, "There he goes _again_."

When he woke the second time, he remembered immediately to open his eyes. He found himself, instead of staring down at the black marble interior of the Master's TARDIS from what he could only assume was the same Hadron web in which he had been suspended only a few weeks before, looking up at a long array of blue tube lights. The brightness assailed his eyes and head like an army with pickaxes, but at least he knew he wasn't dreaming. It suddenly occurred to him that he had no idea how long he'd been asleep. His natural instinct was to sit bolt upright, but there was something holding him in place—fortunately, since about three seconds after the instinct came he realised that his ribs were still broken. Well, good, he thought, at least I haven't been asleep _that_ long.

"Hello," said the Master, from somewhere nearby. Adric looked around, finding he had at least full mobility in his neck, but still did not see her. "Feeling any better? I had to disconnect you because you were scrambling my sensors."

"What have you done?" Adric demanded through gritted teeth. Although his broken ribs were healing, they still hurt.

"Oof, where to start. Well, when I first left Gallifrey—"

"To _me._ "

"Oh, to _you._ I should have known, it's always about _you._ Well, you see, my ship's computer is tragically outdated; I realised that when I had you create Castrovalva. Such wonderful things were suddenly within my grasp, things the Doctor couldn't even dream of. Of course, then he stole you back, and I was left with my inferior equipment again, and after Castrovalva collapsed, it was even worse than usual. So you see, I came to get you, because I need your mind."

"How did you escape?"

"Escape? Oh, Castrovalva. Well, I didn't. Those wretched citizens were going to tear me to bits, but the algorithm collapsed before they could, and I was trapped in a time-space loop."

"And you managed to get back to your TARDIS and reverse the loop polarity long enough to slip out?"

"Ooh, yes, well done! Unfortunately it had all taken its toll on my old body, so I had to get a new one."

"Why . . . a girl?" In his pain and confusion, he forgot the words 'are you.'

"That wasn't my choice, I told you. I attempted a forced regeneration using some technology I borrowed from Gallifrey—"

"Stole, you mean."

"If you like. But it didn't work particularly well, and I ended up with this. Not that I'm complaining."

"You haven't answered me."

"I haven't? Oh, no, I haven't. I put you back in my web—just for a bit—and I was _going_ to test the capabilities of the block-transfer computation with a much bigger project than Castrovalva. But then you lost consciousness and I had to bring you here to recuperate. That's all right, though, the tests can wait and so can I. You're no good to me muzzy. Or dead. Especially dead. That can't be fixed as easily."

"Bigger than Castrovalva?" said Adric, who was about four sentences behind. "By how much?"

"That's not important right now. Focus on recovering. How long does it usually take your bones to heal?"

"Weeks." Adric replied. "Sometimes months."

"You little liar." There was an edge to her voice that suggested he should remedy this situation as quickly as possible, or suffer for it.

"Days, I meant. A week and a half at most."

"That's more like it. Remember, Adric, I've been studying you for quite some time now. You'd best not try to guess what I have and haven't found out. I don't like liars."

Adric gulped and nodded. He had forgotten for just a moment that this woman was the Master, quite possibly the most evil being in the entire universe. He would have to be careful not to do that again.

"Where am I?" he asked after a suitable pause, hoping to distract the Master from her annoyance at him.

"In my medical bay. Does the Doctor not have one in his TARDIS? Maybe I'm not as far behind as I thought." This seemed to considerably improve her mood.

"Why can't I move?"

"Because you're shackled to the table. I can't have you getting up and wandering away in the middle of the night. Even _I_ have to sleep sometime."

Adric raised his head as far as he could and looked down the length of his body. There was blood staining his tunic—that was the first thing he noticed—and, sure enough, his hands and ankles were clamped to the metal slab on which he lay with heavy steel bands.

"Oh." he said.

"Are you all right? You look a bit peaky."

Adric wasn't sure he'd ever seen so much of his own blood before. It spread out in a wilted flower from the site of his broken ribs, causing him to wonder just how broken they really were.

"Oh, the blood. Don't worry about it, you're fine. The bones poked right through your side. It was horrible," she said gleefully, "but I managed to stuff them back in and get them lined up properly. You needn't look so offended."

He let his head drop back onto the table, feeling ill. The idea of the Master's hands forcing his broken bones back into place, bloody up to the second knuckle, and a smile on her pretty face, was almost too much to cope with. A wave of nausea swept over him at the same time as cold chills trickled down his spine, and he tried not to let his discomfort show on his face. That would amuse her far too much—

Pretty?

"Well, I'll leave you to it. Worlds to conquer, mischief to make, chaos to sow, you know."

He was vaguely aware of her rising and walking past him—she paused a moment to pat his cheek in a cruel gesture of complete control—and left the room, flicking off the lights as she went. Adric's face burned where she had touched him, as though his skin itself were shying away from the touch. He lay there in the dark for endless hours, mustering all the hatred he could manage towards the Master.

Feeling anything else—camaraderie, gratitude, trust—would simply be unacceptable.


	3. Numb3rs

A gentle knock at the door roused Nyssa from her heavy grief, and she called, "Come in," almost glad of the distraction.

The door opened and the Doctor poked his sandy-haired head inside. Nyssa still wasn't quite used to his new face, and wasn't sure what to make of his expression. She reminded herself gently that the Doctor had lost many, many people in his time. It made her strangely angry.

"Er, we've arrived." he said, his pale eyes studying her with no small amount of concern. "If you feel like coming outside, Tegan and I will be just round the corner."

"I'll stay here, thanks." Nyssa replied, averting her eyes. For some reason, she found it difficult to look into the Doctor's face—perhaps it had something to do with the heavy knot of resentment in her chest, the broken gold-and-blue star pin she turned in her hands.

The Doctor entered her room and sat down on her bed next to her, in a gesture that reminded her painfully of her own late father. How many people had she lost in the past months? How many more could she stand to lose?

"I'm sorry about Adric." the Doctor said gently, sincere regret in his voice. "I wish I could have done more."

"You could have." Nyssa said, surprising herself with the sharpness of her voice.

The Doctor sighed and studied the far corner of her ceiling. "I know, and I'm terribly sorry. The transportation was too difficult—we could all have died, and I couldn't risk your life and Tegan's—"

"Then why didn't you tell him?" she demanded, rounding on him sharply, the words pouring out in a torrent. "Why didn't you tell him the impact wouldn't destroy Earth? He could have gotten on the escape pod with the rest of the crew, he could have escaped in time—"

"I didn't _know._ I thought the ship would crash into 26th century Earth and destroy the most important political meeting in the planet's history. If I had known he would use the Cybermen's device to push the ship back in time, if I had known the others would destroy the Cybermen onboard and get to the escape pod—don't you think I would have told him? I did all I could, Nyssa, I promise you that."

"Then why can't we go back and save him?" she demanded, swallowing back tears and rage. "This is a fifth dimension craft, why can't we go back?"

The Doctor shook his head slowly, his brows pulled together in consternation. "I've told you, there are some rules even a Timelord can't break. That collision is a fixed point in history. If I do anything to change it, it could potentially alter the entire course of Earth's history and any planet later associated with it. I don't know how big a part Adric played in the ship's crash. I can't risk it. I'm sorry."

"You could find out."

"Find out what?"

"How big a role he played." she explained through gritted teeth, trying her best not to snap at the Doctor again.

"What would that solve? What if we arrived and found that he was involved up to the last second? We would have to leave again and abandon him, and you must agree that's infinitely worse."

Nyssa could not find a reply to that, but her anger obviously still showed on her face, for the Doctor placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. The old Doctor wasn't much better at this sort of thing, granted, but he was a _bit_ better, and that made a difference. Nyssa wanted the old Doctor back, suddenly. The old Doctor would not have cared about Timelord rules. The _old_ Doctor would have gone back for Adric.

"Adric made a choice. He decided not to take the escape pod with the rest of the crew. He knew the risks involved, and he chose to save Earth. We all miss him, and we all wish it could have ended differently. But he wouldn't want us to grieve unnecessarily, now would he? Adric made his choice, and it's no use wishing yourself away over it. He would have wanted you to move on. I know he would."

"You don't know anything about him," Nyssa growled through clenched teeth, biting back harsher words.

The Doctor stood, taking his hand from her shoulder with no small amount of tenderness. "I'm sorry, Nyssa. If there's anything I can do to help, you will let me know, won't you?"

Nyssa did not reply—how could she, when there was nothing left to say?—and so the Doctor, downcast, took his leave.

As soon as the door closed, Nyssa flung herself onto her bed and sobbed despondently, the broken star clutched to her chest, until she could no longer stand the sound of her own unhappiness.

* * *

 

The days aboard the Master's TARDIS passed with improbable lethargy (he would have thought 'impossible,' but it couldn't be impossible if it was happening), each grinding into the next with all the enthusiasm of a plodding old cow. Adric's ribs were healing nicely, but he was growing ever more desperate to escape, and increasingly convinced that it was impossible. The Master visited him every day, tending to his daily needs, torturing him with all of her terrible plans, her horrendous mechanisms to make the world fall down—or that was how it seemed, at first.

"And anyway," she was saying, near the end of the third day, "I would need terrific amounts of power for a venture of that magnitude, not to mention a properly functioning quantum time circuit, and I've no idea where to get either."

"You _could_ loop the current power source through a replicator circuit and multiply it infinitely," Adric mused to himself, watching the numbers flicker through his vision as the possibilities unfolded. He was now permitted to sit in a chair (to which he was shackled) when he and the Master were having their almost-conversations (Adric did not get to talk much).

"If I had a quantum replicator circuit, yes." the Master agreed. "Yes, that could work quite well. There's still that teeny issue though, you see, of my not having a quantum circuit of any kind. Were I to implement your method, I would need two—one for the power source, and one for the normal function of my TARDIS, and where am I going to get _two_ quantum circuits at this hour?"

"Are they standard?" Adric asked, the numbers distracting him from the actual conversation—he was living in a hypothetical moment, and was not exactly in touch with reality.

"Yes, by Rassilon, that's brilliant!"

"What is?" The numbers had gone, and Adric was beginning to feel like he had done something very stupid.

"I could trade for the Doctor's! Of course, I would need something terribly important to trade him for it, because I'm not entirely sure I could get away with stealing it. And who knows, he might even have an extra. I _knew_ there was a reason I let you talk." (She hadn't always.)

"You could trade me." Adric suggested.

"Why would I do that?" she asked, quirking a fine eyebrow. "An immense power source and a functioning quantum time circuit will do me no good if I don't have you. You _are_ the mainframe of my computer, you know."

"I thought I was just for the block-transfer computations."

"Initially, yes. But a living mind is infinitely more efficient at processing data and extrapolating results from it than any machine, no matter how advanced. That's why androids never really took off, and why Cybermen are such bad conversationalists. And, of course, total idiots."

Adric thought about this. "So . . . _I'm_ your computer?"

She hefted her hands to heaven and rolled her eyes. "If you want to make it ridiculously simple, then yes, you're my computer. Now that you've finally puzzled out the _simplest_ aspect of my plans, would you mind supplying some more _useful_ input on the quantum circuit problem?"

Stunned, Adric could but gape for a moment or two. "Input?" he finally managed.

"Isn't that what we've been doing this whole time? Brainstorming?"

"No!" he cried, thinking back over the conversations he'd had with this woman over the past few days, horrified at the thought that perhaps he had been helping her—sure enough, when he put his mind to it, he realised that he had supplied many a solution to a hypothetical problem, when presented with one. And, as he thought about it more, perhaps not all the problems had been hypothetical. . . . Had he really been answering her questions so readily, so automatically as to not notice that he was being used to further her plans?

"How odd. That's what _I_ was doing. Are you going to clam up now because you know you're helping me?"

In answer, Adric clenched his teeth and fists and glared at the Master with undisguised hatred. She laughed.

"Oh, very well then. You should be healed by now—here, I'll take a look."

Anger turned to embarrassment with alarming speed as the Master crossed the few steps from her chair to his.

"Get away from me!" he cried, struggling against his restraints. He would rather be tortured than have her put her hands on him—it was really almost the same thing.

"Stop that." she admonished, standing before him, hands on hips, looking down with an air of sharp disapproval. "I won't ask twice."

"Keep away!" he protested again, fighting all the harder for her warnings. She sighed and pulled a small silver rectangle from the pocket of her coat, displaying it so it caught the light. Adric calmed his struggling and kept his eyes on the gleaming device, for the look on the Master's face implied that he would not enjoy its purpose—she would.

"Do you know what this is?" she asked, and then, without waiting for an answer: "This little gadget is a nerve disruptor. With it, I can command every single nerve cell in your body. I can control you as I could control a mindless android, I can shut you down like a simple computer, _and,_ " she hastened to add, with a gleam of amusement in her clear brown eyes, "I can instruct every last centimeter of your body to feel the worst pain it has ever known, and prevent you from losing consciousness or going into shock. Now. I'm going to check on the progress of your ribs, and if you so much as _twitch_. . . ." She brandished the nerve disruptor and smirked. "Do you understand?"

Adric gulped back a sharp reply and nodded. He kept forgetting that he was face-to-face with the most evil being in the entire universe. One day it was going to cost him.

He kept his eyes fixed on her as she knelt beside him and dispassionately peeled his blood-soaked tunic from the site of his injury, bit his cheek to keep from flinching when she touched her cold fingers to the light scars where the bones had stabbed through his skin, clenched his fists until his arms ached when she pressed hard on the bones in search of any unhealed cracks that still lurked beneath his pale skin. Somehow he managed not to twitch, struggle, or even say anything stupid for the entirety of the examination. However, he was greatly relieved when the Master stood and brushed invisible dust from the knees of her trousers. It was short-lived.

"Well, you're looking positively spiffing." she said with a roguish grin. "Time to get back to work then, eh?" And, gently, she touched the nerve disruptor to his neck.

It was a terrible feeling, as though his entire mind and soul were being crammed into a small box and shoved onto a back shelf out of the way while some other entity told his limbs to move (once they had been released from their shackles)—like watching from behind someone else's eyes as he walked down corridors, took unfamiliar turns as though he traveled them every day, stood harmlessly next to the Master as she opened the locked door to the flight deck of her TARDIS—was she really shorter than him?—as that other person climbed willingly into the death-trap that was the Master's Hadron web and submitted himself to its supercharged strands. The Master pressed a button on the nerve disruptor's flat silver surface, and Adric was suddenly his own master again. His first thought was escape, even though he knew it was futile, but he found that his muscles were not entirely comfortable with their sudden change of ownership and were not available for use at the moment.

"Troublesome, isn't it?" the Master commented, still smirking. "Now you know how _I_ feel when you won't be quiet and do what I tell you. What was that you were saying about a quantum replicator circuit? I just might be able to jerry-rig one, with some help and luck."

"Go rot in the swamp," Adric snarled, finding that his voice came easily when the rest of his body was in mutiny. Perhaps he really _did_ talk too much.

"Ouch, that hurt." she said, her voice as expressionless as her face. Suddenly her tone became sharp and commanding. "Coordinate: alpha-four-four-six by sigma-two-eight-three by chi-six-four-six by rho-two-eight-eight-three."

Adric was suddenly overwhelmed by numbers and symbols, realising in a small part of his brain that had not been annexed by the Master's computers that the coordinates were four-dimensional and that he was being used to plot a course in space and time, although he did not know to what end.

Somewhere off to his left, an anomaly surfaced. He didn't want to tell the Master about it, wanted to let it stand and watch the TARDIS be deflected from its course by a small bump in the quantum road, but at the same time he simply could not stand to let the anomaly remain—he couldn't let the numbers be _wrong._

"Anomaly at sigma-two-seven-zero." he reported, quite before he knew what he was doing. The numbers raced, and he began to see a pattern in them, a path opening in front of him—except for that damn anomaly, it would be perfect.

"Oh, of _course._ " the Master muttered faintly—or perhaps she spoke normally and his hearing was dulled by the flood of numbers pumped into his mind. "Adjust for gravitropic drift by point three per-cent in the sigma coordinate."

Ah, there it was. A small twitch of the numbers and the path was clear and beautiful and whole, and he could very nearly see their destination. It looked oddly like—

Suddenly all of the numbers fled his mind like birds from a thrown stone. He tried to grasp at their fleeting trails, but they slid like sand through his clutches. He was left feeling weak and trembly, and empty—terribly, terribly empty. His mind felt vast and lonely without the numbers to keep him company.

"Where. . . ?" he mumbled, trying hard to fend off sleep—he was so very tired, although he didn't know why.

"Fantastic!" the Master cried, staring at her screen in wonder. "That's _got_ to be four times faster than the old one!" She noticed Adric as though he had just walked into the room. "Don't worry about it."

"Why?"

She clicked her tongue in annoyance and rolled her eyes. "Such a tedious question. Just go, would you?"

Without waiting for an answer, she pressed a button on her console—Adric felt as though someone had pulled very hard on his brainstem.

Then the numbers were back, the path as beautiful and perfect as he had left it, only it was moving, and little things would pop from the sides and leap in front of him, and he felt he had to dodge them, or the whole stream of numbers would collapse—he could not let that happen, could not let the numbers leave him alone with himself again—and so he dodged and weaved, exerting all of his mental energies on keeping the TARDIS on course.

His companion sat back and smiled to herself, listening to the screech of time and space bending out of his way.

 


	4. Singularity

The Master's TARDIS was running swimmingly, for once, and its supervisor sat in a corner, drowsing. Adric watched the numbers whirl from his vantage point in the Hadron web, sinking into the gentle rhythm of the pathway, predicting anomalies before the sensors even picked them up. It was a quiet ship, and a peaceful one, at least for a little while.

Up ahead, Adric could see an odd bend in the path, some kind of infolding of forces. He kept expecting to arrive at it, watching it grow steadily larger, adjusting his perceptions to deal with its apparent distance. It must have been ten times larger than he had originally predicted—no, more like twenty or thirty, they were still nowhere close. The TARDIS began to drift towards it—he could feel the movement as though the ship was a part of his own body, or his body part of the ship—slowly, almost imperceptibly. He let it, because he had never encountered anything even remotely like this aboard the Doctor's TARDIS, and he was, naturally, curious.

Suddenly the ship gave an almighty lurch, and fifteen various alarms started screaming. The Master half-leapt, half-tumbled from her sleeping corner, darting immediately to the console with its array of flashing lights, most of them now red with warning.

"What is it?" she demanded over the wail of klaxons, fingers flying across the keypads.

"Gravitational anomaly," Adric stammered, trying to steer the TARDIS back to its flight path and finding he couldn't.

" _Anomaly?_ " cried the Master, typing furiously. Her biotic mainframe noticed with despondent detachment that she was checking to see how far from the programmed course they had drifted. "It's a goddamn black hole!"

Adric, it seemed, had seriously screwed up. "So we're trapped." he muttered, expecting she couldn't hear him over the racket the TARDIS was making in its terror. He was quite wrong.

"Shut up and do exactly as I tell you." she commanded, still focused intently on the screens before her. Adric felt heat rise to his face, then realised this was hardly the time to be feeling such selfish emotions as shame. "First thing, shut off those damn alarms!"

He strangled the TARDIS mid cry, and could feel the whole ship humming with the terrible force of the black hole. A b-flat, he noted abstractedly.

"Keep us steady in the rho coordinate." She switched to another console as Adric struggled to hold the bucking ship in a restricted time interval. It appeared that the black hole was distorting more than the standard three dimensions. He felt the mass of the TARDIS shift, like a boat turning its prow into the waves of a storm-tossed sea. "Switch alpha-helix conductors to full transmittance."

Adric did as he was told. As the space-time vortex stretched and buffeted the ship around him, he felt a terrific surge of power flood through him and the TARDIS. It was as though she had coiled herself up, prepared to spring. Shortly after, the Master manually switched over the beta and gamma conductors—which could very well have blown up the TARDIS—and the power increased a hundred fold. If he didn't do something, and soon, a vital circuit would burn out somewhere and render the ship inoperable, and they would be drawn into the eternal gravitational vortex to die an infinitely slow death. With an enormous effort of will, he pushed all the outlying rooms of the TARDIS away from its center—the decreased density would absorb the extra energy, at least for a while.

"Good!" cried the Master, still frantically inputting commands for small spacial adjustments. "When I say now, increase density thirty percent and put the engines on full throttle and _do not stop_ until I tell you to!"

He felt the ship turn broadside to the sweeping suck of the black hole, so her engines were pointed just off-centre to the highest gravitational pull—she was shaking visibly now with the subsonic roar of the forces around her, crying out in terror, in pain—

 _"Now!"_ roared the Master, and disabled all overload safeguards with the punch of a button, and Adric yanked on the ship, making it contract, releasing untold amounts of energy, all of which he funneled to the main thrusters; he could feel the ship stretching, straining to break the gravitational leash of the event horizon, overheating, blowing fuses, losing surface accessories to that terrible monster behind her.

The leash snapped, and the TARDIS shot forward, flinging the Master to the ground along with several other objects that had not been welded down. Adric barely noticed—he could still feel the claws of the black hole scrabbling to get hold of his TARDIS, and only when they had gone completely did he cut back on the throttle.

The Master scrambled to her feet and ran to the nearest functioning screen—a few were broken and smoking—and ran a quick systems check. Then she leapt into the air and cheered.

"We did it!" she exulted, punching nothing. "We _did_ it!"

Although exhausted, Adric could not help but share her joy. After all, he—they (she would kill him if he took all the credit)—had just accomplished the impossible. After a minute or so, thankfully, she calmed down, dropping to the floor, laughing and trembling with adrenaline.

"You brilliant boy," she breathed, and leaned her head back against the console. "Hold coordinates. You need to rest."

Adric suddenly remembered how heavy his limbs seemed despite the support of the web's high-powered filaments, how sluggish his brain, and he only just had time to fix the TARDIS to its current time-space location before he drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When he finally woke, he got the distinct impression that something significant had changed. He was still up in the Hadron web, the TARDIS was still functioning normally around him—she was now in motion, but a quick review of the data logs revealed that she had been traveling at a steady pace for several hours. This, then, should not have disturbed him, as he had been subconsciously aware of it for just as long. So what, then, felt wrong?

He was alone in the console room, that was one thing—since he had left the medical bay, the Master had not been out of his sight. He decided, on a whim, to look for her, for lack of anything better to do. It was amazing how much nothing could fit into a universe full of wonders.

It took less than three seconds to find the Master. She was in her room, asleep, looking oddly vulnerable, curled up with a pillow held tightly to her chest. Adric sighed and focused his attention back on himself and his feeling of discomfort. Perhaps the damage to the TARDIS was affecting his self-perception—he was in such intimate contact with her that it was becoming difficult to know the difference. But no, he decided (after a quick but thorough analysis), this was something happening in his actual flesh-and-blood body. It was a feeling entirely independent of the TARDIS and her multifarious systems.

With the sudden impulse to laugh, Adric realised he was hungry. It seemed such a trivial need, now that he had the whole of space and time at his beck and call, now that he had successfully escaped the event horizon of a black hole. It was a relic of his simpler life—he almost called it his childhood—aboard the Doctor's TARDIS. And yet, hungry he was, and that made it very difficult to concentrate.

Especially with the memories it brought of Nyssa picking fun at him, calling him a pig at the very strange fancy-dress party on Earth. She had been so beautiful then. . . . He smiled a smile that had very little to do with happiness.

A soft _ping_ and the cessation of movement announced that the TARDIS had landed. Adric was just peering out through the external video feed when the Master walked in, her hair disheveled and her eyes bleary. She seemed almost ugly in comparison to his memories of Nyssa.

"Welcome to Earth." she said, raising her eyes to his face and smiling. "A hundred and forty million years before the birth of Man."


	5. Ugly Green Boots

Adric was gobsmacked—what could one say to a statement like that? 'Oh, good' sounded ridiculous and patronising, 'When do we get to explore' seemed childish, and 'Let me down from this web, you stupid bitch' was really quite irrelevant.

"Why?" he mustered, after a moment of mental toil. He hadn't quite yet stopped reeling from the journey there, and the TARDIS was still providing plenty of distracting input.

_"Why?"_ the Master parroted, quite enjoying his discomfort. "Because, that's _why._ "

"That isn't an answer." Adric objected.

" _'Why'_ isn't a question." she returned.

"It is!"

"No, it's a question _word,_ it introduces a question. If you're not going to ask properly, I'm not going to answer logically."

"You're making this up."

"Maybe I am, but you're the one without any answers."

"All right, then, why are we on Earth?" The 'stupid bitch' line was looking better all the time.

"Because that's where my business is."

" _Very_ helpful."

"You're just a computer. I've no reason whatsoever to answer your questions. There's nothing in it for me."

"If you don't," Adric threatened, "I'll shut down life support."

"If you do," the Master rejoined, "you'll die too."

"You don't know how long I can survive without air."

"I can certainly find out."

"But then you wouldn't have a mainframe."

"Oh, yes I would. It would just be an inferior, inorganic mainframe, requiring the same repairs it required before you got here. You're irrelevant and you know it, so stop wasting my time with empty threats."

Adric was infuriated by this point, and, being Adric, overrode his common sense in favour of taking the opportunity to be right.

"If you try to disconnect me, I'll blow out your entire system, and you'll be stuck here for the rest of your life." he told her, prepared to do so at the drop of a hat.

The Master tossed her head haughtily and turned to her controls, ignoring him. In his mind, this meant he had won. Smug and self-satisfied, he settled back to watch the Master work. He began to feel ill again, but put it down to his hunger, for a few crucial moments, at least. By the time he had realised something was genuinely amiss, the Master had already disconnected him from the vital life functions of the TARDIS, and was still working.

"What are you doing?" Adric demanded, frightened by the loss of control. If he didn't have the TARDIS, his only bargaining chip was gone. He would once again be at the mercy of his captor, whom he had just angered.

"I've no idea who you're talking to." the Master replied, an amused lilt to her voice.

"I'm talking to you." he replied, struggling to keep hold of the TARDIS. She was blocking off systems one by one, jumping around the ship with such randomness that Adric could not pinpoint which facet of his power would be taken next, and could not, therefore, defend it.

"Who's 'you?'" she asked. She was trying not to laugh.

"You're the only one here!"

"I'm afraid you'll have to be a _bit_ more specific. You could be talking to anyone."

Adric gritted his teeth. "What are you doing, _Master._ " he growled. She turned slowly, eyes sparkling, a smile tugging at the corners of her coral-pink lips.

"Ooh, I _love_ it when you call me 'master.'" she murmured huskily.

There was a moment of silence.

Suddenly the Master's face lit up with delight, and she leapt onto the platform beneath the Hadron web and raised herself to Adric's eye-level. "Are you _blushing?_ " she demanded gleefully. If the heat beneath his cheeks—and neck, and scalp, and ears—was any indication, the answer was 'yes.' "By Rassilon, you're _blushing!_ " And she dissolved into a fit of laughter the likes of which the young Alzarian had never seen.

"It's not funny," he suggested belatedly, his blush only worsening from ridicule. It was one thing to be made fun of, and quite another to be humiliated.

The Master gasped in a few breaths of air, wiping tears from her eyes as her laughter subsided. "I've got to do that more often." she commented, still grinning. "You just take yourself so _seriously._ "

"Will you tell me why we're on Earth, now?" he demanded, desperately trying to change the subject (while trying not to seem desperate).

"Oh, all right. You've earned it, I suppose. This is where and when the power source I need landed. Since I can't get my hands on a quantum replicator circuit, I came here instead."

"Your TARDIS seems to be running swimmingly." Adric commented. The Master waved a dismissive hand as she hopped down from the platform and went back to her controls.

"You've only the Doctor's TARDIS to judge by, and his, let me tell you, is a piece of rubbish. It barely runs at all."

"We escaped a black hole in this thing!"

"All the more reason to get it fixed. I think that was the last flight she had in her, poor old girl."

Adric felt like he had been punched in the gut. 'Old girl' was what the Doctor had called his TARDIS, the old Doctor, who had taken Adric in even though he was a stowaway, and the thought of what this woman had done to him made him so angry he could scream. She had _killed_ him, and now she was rattling off his sayings like they were hers to say.

"Goodness," the Master commented, "we appear to be having a power surge."

And besides that, who _knew_ what she still had in store for the Doctor—he obviously still factored into her plots—and the universe in general? She was going to run amok causing all sorts of chaos and destruction, and he was going to be _stuck_ here, trussed up like a great load of river fruit, an unwilling accomplice to it all, with a front-row seat to the evils this woman would commit, helpless to stop it.

"It's getting worse." she said, a hint of worry showing in her alto voice. "Where is it _coming_ from?"

Hadn't she done enough already? She'd destroyed half the universe—including Trakken—killed Nyssa's mother and father, turned Tegan's aunt into a doll, kidnapped Adric and forced him to do her bidding _twice_ now, and, above all of that, she had _killed_ the Doctor. Now, to add insult to injury, she was going to rig up some monstrous power supply and use him to harness it, and laugh at him while she did.

" _Hell!"_ the Master cried, as a circuit next to her hand exploded. "What the devil is going _on?"_

Adric smelled smoke, the bitter scent of burning plastic and fried wires, and his anger began to subside. What little of the TARDIS still remained in his power was loaded with power to the limits of its capacity, and, in some cases, past it. Even as he noticed these things, the destructive power surge began to fade, and was soon gone altogether. Puzzled, he checked the systems he had—everything seemed fine, except for a few blown circuits. He was pulled back to himself by a loud hissing sound and a rush of cold air.

The Master was spraying the console with white mist from a red canister, one hand covering her eyes from the blowback. Smoke rose from the console in a black, greasy cloud and pooled on the ceiling.

"Your TARDIS is on fire," Adric commented.

"I _know._ " the Master snapped, cutting off the flow of cold mist and checking to see if the console was still burning. "What the Hell. . . ?" she muttered, investigating the wiring around her, ducking beneath the dashboard and checking for blown fuses. "So what _caused_ it?"

"Isn't there something you were going to do here?"

"Shut up." she barked from the floor. However, his words seemed to have stirred her, because she rose shortly after and played an extremely simplistic virtual game which involved a ball and two paddles, probably just to annoy Adric.

When she had won, she pressed a few keys in quick succession, and was gratified by a loud _thump_ from behind her.

"Whoops," she said, staring at the lump curled up on the floor, grumbling to itself, "I seem to have dropped you."

Adric rubbed the small circular burns on his wrists and the bottoms of his feet from where he had been connected to the web. He was going to be bruised from the fall, that was certain, but for the moment the burns and the lack of input from the TARDIS occupied his full range of unhappiness. A strong hand clasped onto his arm and hoisted him to his feet.

"Where're my shoes?" he queried as he was guided across the cold black floor.

"I threw them out." the Master replied. "They were ugly, anyway."

"Why?"

" _Why?_ Because I felt like it. Keep walking, you can get new shoes any time. Less ugly ones, too."

The world seemed rather foggy as he was half-dragged towards the door. Perhaps it was the lack of a hundred and fifty electronic feeds from the TARDIS that made the world seem so flat and grey, or maybe he was just very hungry.

"I'm hungry." he said.

"You're always hungry. Stop complaining."

"Haven't eaten in three days."

"By Rassilon, is that even possible? I would've thought you'd keel over after twenty minutes."

Anger sizzled just under Adric's skin, but he didn't have the energy to bring it up to full boil, and it petered out. "Please," he said, swallowing his pride in a few gulps, "I need to eat."

"Oh, _fine._ " the Master said, and dropped him. "Wait here." And she left.

Once he was sure she was gone, Adric heaved himself to his feet, stumbled to the console, and slid the nerve disruptor into his pocket.


	6. Nerve Disruptor

Adric tried to calm himself before the Master came back. If she suspected anything was amiss, she would investigate until she found that her weapon was missing, and Adric's plans would be ruined. He eased himself to the floor, leaning on the console for support. Some of his collapse had been a performance put on for the Master's benefit, but he  _was_ terribly hungry, and his muscles did not feel quite right. He tried to breathe deeply and stay calm. After all, it was not as though he hadn't been in this situation before— of course, on the leafy green planet of the Kinda, when he had stolen something important and tried to escape his captors, it had not ended so well. . . . Best not to think of that. So long as he kept his head and didn't do anything stupid, he would be fine. Unless the Master had security monitors in her TARDIS, in which case, he was already as good as dead, so there was no real use worrying about it.

Adric worried about it anyway.

So it was that when the Master re-entered the console room, Adric nearly bit his tongue off trying to not look startled. Then he was glad he had done so, because the smell of the grilled sandwich she was carrying threatened to set him drooling all over himself. He was determined not to say anything, not to show any sign of weakness—

"Is that grilled cheese?" he asked— no, _whimpered._ So much for showing no sign of weakness. To his immense surprise, she didn't laugh, or ridicule him. She just handed him the sandwich and stood back.

"Yep." she said, and glanced at some round device strapped to her wrist. "Now eat up, I'm in a hurry."

She didn't have to tell him twice. He had, for reasons best not thought about, not wanted to look silly or desperate in front of her. All of that went out the window as soon as he took the first bite of the sandwich. He hadn't realised it was possible to be so terribly hungry. If you hadn't watched closely, you would have thought he'd _inhaled_ the sandwich like a gargantuan vacuum cleaner. He certainly felt as though he contained a vacuum.

"Rassilon's beard, that was fast." the Master commented. "You weren't joking. Come on then, time to go."

"But—" Adric protested. The Master grabbed him by the arm and hauled him bodily to his feet.

"Shut up and move. I've fed you, now be quiet, or it'll never happen again."

For once, Adric was quiet. Something had her irritated, and he couldn't be sure it wasn't his little unborn attempt at rebellion. It would be best for him to just keep quiet and hope.

"I didn't think that would work." she said, jovially. "I'll have to threaten your food more often. Ooh, just forgetting _one_ little thing, don't go anywhere."

Adric's heart pounded in his throat. She was going back to the console, going back for her nerve disruptor, the nerve disruptor that was in his pocket at that very instant; her back was turned to him, just for a moment—

Before she knew what had hit her, Adric had knocked her to the floor and slammed her head against it several times, one hand entwined in her hair, the other braced against the black marble floor to help him keep his balance. Though her head was fuzzy from the jostling and the pain, the Master still had the presence of mind to knock this hand out from under him, and then, when he fell on her, to bite his ear very very hard. She was gratified by a sharp cry of pain from her attacker, and proceeded to punch him in the kidneys a couple times. Then he drove his knee into her thigh, which didn't hurt particularly, but it was distracting. It didn't take long for him to get a hand around her throat, but by then she was already kicking and bucking like a ridden wild horse, trying to throw him off of her. They rolled several times across the floor, the Master repeatedly trying to throw a knee into a very sensitive place into which knees are not supposed to go, and Adric trying to scratch her eyes out with his fingers.

Suddenly, all motion stopped, save for heavy breathing. A cold metal rectangle pressed into the Master's soft, pale throat, trembling ever so slightly as Adric trembled, although whether it was with adrenaline, fear, or hunger didn't matter. The fact was, he had a potentially deadly weapon pressed to the Master's neck and was fully prepared to use it; she could see so in the blackness of his eyes.

"Go on." she said, and cracked a lopsided grin. "I know you want to."

"Which button?" Adric growled. He was rather wishing now that he had waited to eat after dispatching of his captor— the grilled cheese was not settling well when followed by several hard punches.

The Master raised an eyebrow and snickered. "Like I'd tell you. How stupid do you think I am?"

"I don't need this to kill you." he asserted, although he wasn't sure it was true.

"Oh, of course not. It's just so much more convenient. If you're going to kill me with your bare hands, you'd best go ahead and do it, before I start fighting back. You, of _course_ , would win, but I might inflict some unsightly bruises before I go."

"Don't make fun of me."

"Don't say stupid things, and I won't be inclined to." She rolled her tea-brown eyes. "There's only two buttons on the thing, take an educated guess."

Adric pressed a button. For an instant, nothing happened.

Then the shock traveled up his arm and flowed out through his body, and every nerve was crying out in pain, and he couldn't let go of the horrid little device, his hand was clutched spasmodically around it, he was rolling on the floor, drowning in pain. . . .

"Should've told you." the Master said, sitting up. "It's coded to your DNA."

Carefully, she plucked the device from his hand, and put it in her pocket.

"Now calm down before you hurt yourself. _Honestly,_ " she added to herself, "the boy's a walking disaster."

Adric whimpered. The Master sighed. "Get up, you little fool." she said, hoisting him to his feet again. "You're more trouble than a box full of Tribbles."

"Wha—?" said Adric.

"It would help if you would shut up. You're lucky I'm in a hurry, otherwise I would have left you hanging on to that thing for an hour. Now come on, haven't got all day."

She led him from the ship, onwards, toward his ever more uncertain destiny. He was really beginning to wish he'd never been rescued at all.


	7. Thorns

It was hot outside, really, sincerely, blisteringly hot. The air was thin and sandpaper dry, and so  _terrifically_ hot that it was almost blinding. The Master took a moment to get her bearings, squinting across the landscape and shading her eyes with her hand. Adric was glad she had to take that moment, and hoped she would go ahead and help herself to a few more, because he was choking on the dusty air, dizzy and overwhelmed, barely able to make out the setting the Master was surveying. The ground burned his feet, but the air was so fiery inside his throat and lungs that movement seemed unfeasible. He was smouldering inside his cool-weather clothes, and could already feel sweat beading on his forehead, only to be instantly wicked away by the thirsty air. He wasn't sure he had ever been anywhere quite so wickedly hot.

"Oh, damn." the Master cursed mildly, taking her hand off of Adric's arm and putting it on her hip. He thought for a moment of running away, but then saw the bulbous, spine-covered plants that sprouted from the burning dirt at random intervals all around the TARDIS. Some of the spines were easily six centimetres long, and he was sure he saw long strands of thorn-bearing vines festooned between the scrubby bushes. He could almost hear his feet sizzling on the sun-baked earth, and lifted each foot in turn, experimentally. It only made them hurt worse when he put them back down, but once he had started, he couldn't stop.

"I _told_ you the TARDIS wasn't functioning properly!" she scolded Adric. Absently, he noticed that she was wearing a white, long-sleeved jumper and loose white trousers, and some sort of odd white hat with a brim and a sort of cape. He wondered why he hadn't noticed before. "We've landed ten kilometres off the mark! Have you any idea how far that is? Well, no, I suppose you wouldn't. It's a long way, I'll tell you that. Serve you right if I made you walk barefoot the whole way." She pointed at a sharp dark shape which was at once very near and very far off, rising like some ancient monolith from the surrounding scrubland. "See that? That's where we're going. And you said my TARDIS didn't need any repairs." She slapped the back of his head with the flat of her hand, not hard, with an expression of mock-austerity to match it. "Silly boy."

Adric very much wanted to push her down into the dirt and strangle her with a thorny vine, but the nerve disruptor was somewhere on her person, and he still ached from his last encounter with it, not to mention his eternal shame at being stupid enough to use the weapon on himself, and the squirming feeling in his stomach that kicked up whenever he thought of touching the Master. The woman made his skin crawl, and he was never sure whether, when he came into contact with her, he wanted to be sick or scream.

"But I don't suppose you'd survive across all this," she indicated the vast expanse of searing scenery before them, "not without any footwear, so I won't make you walk the whole way."

Swallowing his pride, he just managed to croak out, "Thank—" before she finished her thought.

"Just most of it." And she grinned at him. "Or, you know, you could stay here, locked out of the TARDIS with no water, until either I or the predatory insects, pterosaurs, raptors, et cetera come back looking for you. There's some nasty things about, you know. Bloodsuckers the size of your hand, three of them could drain you dry. And that's just the bugs." She neglected to mention that, in this sort of hot, arid climate, there would be no gigantic mosquitos, flying reptiles, or hungry bipedal lizards to menace him. Dehydration was the only thing he had to worry about, really, but she didn't quite feel like leaving him there, although she had no idea why. "So come on, chop chop, don't complain, or I'll leave you here to shrivel up from dehydration and blood loss. Move, go on."

Adric had a good hunch that she was bluffing, but he knew very little about prehistoric Earth, and wasn't willing to take the chance. He'd seen spiders the size of a man's hand hidden inside riverfruit, and if there could be a place so horribly hot and dry, well, perhaps anything was possible. N-Space hadn't pulled any punches so far, and he no longer expected it to. So he took a step, and then another, feeling his feet burn with each new encounter with the burning earth.

"Excellent." said the Master, walking alongside him. She crunched through a couple spiny plants and then sighed exasperatedly when he took a few extra moments to pick his way around them. "Or you could take all day. You know. No rush or anything. Just a leisurely stroll through the prehistoric desert whilst a glacier bears down from the north, sucking up all the moisture everywhere and my TARDIS melts in the sun. Take your time."

For the first time, right as he was about to become extremely angry and hurl the Master headfirst into a tangle of thorns, damn the consequences, he realised that she was worried. She was actually disconcerted to be out in the middle of this hostile land, so far from her target destination. For the first time, she seemed like a real person.

"If you wanted me to go quickly," he retorted, "you shouldn't have thrown out my boots."

"I don't want you going _that_ quickly. You'd run off in an instant."

"You don't know that."

"I do. So here's the deal. Either you walk barefoot, or you only get fed once a week. The choice is now yours, although I've already anticipated your answer."

Adric tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. "All right." he said. "But you can't blame me for not wanting to walk on thorns."

"No, I can't." She snatched his arm again. "So nobody will blame you if you find this walk extremely unpleasant."

And she proceeded to drag him straight across a cactus with spines the length of her pinky, and dragged him on his side through a thorn bush when he fell over and refused to get up. After that, Adric walked, and the Master tended to avoid cacti and thorns whenever possible.

If he hadn't known better, and been distracted by the stabbing pains in his feet and the long, deep scratches the thorns had left down his right side, Adric might have thought she felt sorry for him. All it took was one look at his burned and bloody feet to permanently drive the thought from his head.

Very soon, however, his mind was so blurred with exhaustion and pain that no thought could surface through the mire. His bruises from his latest fight with the Master ached, his throat and lungs burned, his right side twinged every time he took a step, not to mention his feet. He longed to simply fall on his face in the dirt and wait for death to take him, but for some reason he didn't. Perhaps he was subconsciously aware that dying would take some time and be extremely unpleasant, or that the Master would drag him through beds of thorns until he got up and walked again. Whatever the reason, Adric kept walking, and this probably saved his life.

"Ah, _shade._ " the Master said at last. Adric had a fuzzy idea that this was a good thing, and looked up to see what it was. Not far ahead, there was an umbrella-shaped tree tilting precariously to one side, casting an almost perfectly circular shadow on the ground beside its trunk. By an unspoken accord, both the Master and Adric walked a little faster. The young Alzarian walked through three cacti on the way there and didn't even feel it.

It was at least ten degrees cooler in the shade, and the Master instantly dropped herself to the ground and splayed out, soaking up the more manageable temperature. Adric took this as a sign that he, too, could finally take a load off his feet, and sat down heavily, staring blankly at nothing. His first reality check was when the Master shoved a small, clear pill between his lips and roughly told him to swallow it or, as she put it, "shrivel up and die."

Adric swallowed as best he was able with his dry throat, and was astounded when the heavy pill split open in his mouth and gushed forth almost a quarter of a litre of water. His hand flew to his mouth to keep him from spitting out any of the precious liquid. Faintly, he heard the Master laugh.

"The little twits are heavy, but at least they're not cumbersome. And useful, too. _No_ you don't get another one, you'll explode. And pull those thorns out of your foot before they heal in there."

As sick as the thought made him, Adric had to admit that the Master had a point. Upon examining his burned, blood-stained feet, he could see where his skin had already began to close around the long spines and thick thorns that were still embedded in his foot. If he didn't remove them, they would be stuck inside his foot until he worked up the gumption to peel off the layer of new skin to dig them out again.

"I can give you something to numb the pain," the Master suggested, "if you like."

"I'll be fine." Adric spat. His head was clearing now that he had some fluid in him, although he was developing a massive headache. Unfortunately, his indomitable pride and undying suspicion of the Master had returned as well. She was probably trying to poison him.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. "I'm going to sleep. Don't make too much noise." After hesitating a moment, she also took a little blue box from one of the side pockets of her white trousers and laid it gently on the ground between them. "If you decide you need it, there it is."

Adric glared at her and stretched out one leg, resting the opposite foot on his knee, the better to reach the thorns.

"If you scream, I'll punch you in the face." she threatened at last, then lay down and turned her back to him, head pillowed on her hands.

Adric braced himself, took hold of the first cactus spine with his fingernails, breathed deeply, and yanked it from his foot— or tried to. His foot had already healed enough that the spine was trapped like the cork in a wine bottle, and could only be pulled out very slowly, with much effort. It might as well have been barbed.

He hadn't meant to whimper as he finally drew the spine from his foot and watched the blood ooze from the deep puncture wound, but he couldn't help it. Nervously, he glanced over at the Master. If she had heard the noise, she was ignoring it. His eye fell on the little blue box, and he hesitated. Would it be so bad to be poisoned? Certainly it could be no worse than this. Then it occurred to him that perhaps whatever it was did exactly the opposite of what the Master said it would, and would make everything hurt worse than it already did. Adric steeled himself, bit his tongue, and drew the next long spine from his foot. It was exactly as painful as the first.

Not three feet away, his companion squeezed her eyes shut, tried not to think of what was happening behind her, and quelled the trembly feeling of guilt and sickness that was rising in her chest. Just because she had done this to him didn't mean it was her _fault_.

She was only following orders.

 


	8. Medication

At some point, Adric had realised that the Master was not actually going to punch him in the face if he happened to cry out once in a while in the course of extracting the various thorns and spines from the burned soles of his feet. He knew from experience, or rather, trial and error. There comes a certain time in every painful ordeal when it becomes necessary to cry obscenities, whether at the top of one's lungs or as quietly beneath one's breath as humanly possible, or one will simply give up the enterprise and deal with the consequences later. For Adric, this point came very soon after he began, because he thought the Master was asleep. He said something extremely foul that he had heard his older brother Varsh exclaim once, directly after which many people had looked scandalised and someone had, belatedly, covered Adric's ears.

"That's foul." the Master muttered. "Aren't you too young to be saying things like that?"

Petrified and mortified because she had heard him, he responded snappily in his own defence, "Have _you_ ever—"

"No, I haven't, and it sounds terribly uncomfortable; I mean, _sideways?_ Just because _you_ have doesn't give you the right to yell it out in front of the whole universe. _Honestly._ "

Adric went very very red. "That's not what I—"

"I know." There was a hint of a smile in her voice, but she didn't continue. Just when Adric thought she was finished talking, she said, "Maybe you should take a break."

"Don't talk to me." he snapped. Being in pain was detrimental to his disposition, despite how often he was there. Come to think of it, he did seem to get hurt a _lot_. . . .

"No, I mean, before you go into shock." She sat up and turned to look at him, and there was something in her face that so closely mimicked concern that it very nearly fooled Adric. "I notice you haven't resorted to accepting help." she continued, gesturing to the untouched little blue box by her side.

"That won't help." he spat.

"Oh, you don't know that."

"Give me one good reason why I should trust you."

"Why? You'll just assume I'm lying."

"Because you probably _will_ be." he muttered, but he could see she had a point. It was odd, how much the regeneration had changed her personality— come to think of it, how much the last few _days_ had changed her.

"What if I just use simple logic? Logic doesn't lie, you know, even if I do."

"Only if the logic is sound." Adric semi-admitted. "One fallacy will invalidate the whole chain."

"Then I won't make any." the Master replied, and turned to face him full-on, crossing her legs, and placing her hands on her knees.

"Go on." Adric said, actually glad of something to distract him from the pain in his feet. "But I'm listening very carefully."

"Good. Wouldn't have it any other way." She thought for a moment, and then began. "First of all, why would I want you to be in pain?"

"Because you're a malicious bi— er, villain, and you find other people's pain amusing."

"You don't know that. You're only speculating."

"I _do_ know that. I've seen it."

"Recently?"

Adric fidgeted, uncomfortable; then he remembered the outset of their journey. "You dragged me through one of those spine-covered plants right from the start," he pointed out, "and then dragged me through a thorn bush."

"True enough; but where's your proof that I found it amusing?"

This was a more difficult puzzle. Come to think of it, she hadn't seemed to enjoy putting him through this ordeal; she had seemed almost repentant. It was not enough, however, to put him off his game. "Why would you have done it, if you didn't?"

"Oh, I don't know, possibly because I couldn't have you running off into the desert, without water or food or a plan, and _dying._ Unreasonable as that may sound."

"But it wasn't necessary to drag me through a thorn bush and a bed of spines, surely!"

"I'm not stupid, Adric. You've knocked me over and run off before, I don't doubt you could do it again. And don't call me 'Shirley.'"

She had a point there, he had to admit (not about the name-calling; he chose to ignore that). But still, he would not relent. "What reason could you possibly have for wanting to put me out of my misery, then?"

"You make it sound so _permanent._ It's just a pain-killer, not a person-killer."

"Don't you have an answer?"

"In fact, I do. How am I supposed to sleep with you carrying on like that over there?"

"You really expect me to believe you'd just go to sleep with a captive at your back? Likely story. You just said you couldn't have me running off."

"Hey, that was then, this is now. If you want to go dashing off into a bone-dry desert full of prickly bits and dinosaurs, be my guest. I must say, I don't particularly care anymore. You're just a load of trouble."

"So why are you still pushing so hard for me to take the, quote, pain-killer, unquote?"

"This is useless," the Master muttered to herself, rolling her eyes. Then she took the nerve disruptor out of her pocket and tilted it so the sun bounced off of it and right into Adric's eyes. "Take the damn pill or I'll scramble your brains like a fried egg."

"It always comes down to violence with you, doesn't it?" Adric remarked, reaching over slowly for the blue box at the Master's side, wondering how far he could get on injured feet, how long it would take her to catch up to him, and how much brain-scrambling would hurt. By the time his hand reached the blue pillbox, his internal calculations had shown that throwing sand into her eyes and running for it could not possibly be a better alternative than facing whatever her dubious medication would do to him.

"Good choice." the Master remarked, as Adric swallowed the pill. "You want some water to wash that down with?"

"What do you mean, 'good choice?'" Adric demanded, almost choking on the medicine. Whatever was going to happen couldn't be averted now, so he might as well accept it.

"I mean, good choice taking the pill rather than throwing sand in my face and running for it. You wouldn't have got very far, anyway, though you must have thought of that, or you would have gone through with it. Here. Don't be surprised when it goes off; they can be a little violent." she said, handing him another one of the compressed-water capsules. He took it (figuring he might as well; she had already poisoned him once, and there would be no point doing so twice), and found it shockingly heavy.

"Yes, shrinking the volume doesn't, unfortunately, shrink the mass." she commented, as he swallowed the second pill. "Like I said, no less heavy, but certainly more portable."

Adric shrieked when the capsule dissolved in his stomach and let loose its cargo of water; it was rather like being punched in the gut from the inside. After that, he noticed that his feet were starting to go numb.

"It's working," he commented abstractly, reaching down to pull another spine from his flesh. He didn't even flinch.

"Thank _God._ " said the Master, and lay down to go back to sleep. "You might want to work a little faster."

"What?" said Adric, turning wide, dark eyes on her that swiftly narrowed. "Why?"

"Because it won't be more than a few minutes before the narcotic sets in. I _did_ promise you wouldn't have to walk the whole way. I'll carry you while you sleep."

"You lying bitch." Adric accused, without fervour. His words were already beginning to slur. The numbness in his feet had now spread up to his ankles, and continued moving upward. His fingertips were beginning to tingle.

"Language." she warned, and shut her eyes, and smiled. "I told you it was a pain-killer, but you never asked what _else_ it would do. I didn't _technically_ lie, just omitted a figment of the truth that was fundamental to your understanding of the situation."

"You'll pay for this." he vowed.

"You'll thank me later." she returned.

It was not much longer before Adric's fingers became too clumsy to grasp the small shafts of the cactus spines, but his mind was not so fuzzy that he couldn't think of a way around it. He picked up the Master's pillbox and used it to grasp the thorns and spikes, until the world grew too blurry to really be worth looking at and everything got soft and warm. Before he could grasp the concept that the narcotic had reached his brain and he was numb all over from the strong pain-killer, he had fallen over backwards and was out like a light.

It seemed only moments later that the world was slowly filtering back into Adric's consciousness, blurry and silvery-black and strangely bumpy. There was something soft tickling his left cheek (the first part of his body to regain feeling) that smelled faintly of vanilla. Soon after, he could feel that his arms were draped over something, fully extended, with his fingers all tangled together in a worried mess. At about the same time, his feet started throbbing, although not painfully. Half a minute later, he noticed that someone had their hands under his thighs, and his torso was pressed against something warm and fairly firm, and he could feel a steady heartbeat that was not his own tapping against his chest. Vaguely he thought something amiss about that, but soon forgot it in his narcotic-induced haze.

"Piggyback ride?" he attempted to mutter; his throat and tongue were still regaining feeling in throbs and tingles, and his words were mushed like applesauce. Somewhere in the more sensible, less drugged part of his mind, he was aware that this was a ridiculously childish statement and quite possibly the stupidest thing he had ever said. Even the most lucid parts of his mind weren't quite sure why he felt like blushing.

"Oh, are you awake?" came a voice, as though through a curved pane of glass, or a high wind. "Good." He was hiked briefly into the air and caught again, not gently. "You're bloody heavy, you know that? Think you can walk?"

Adric kicked his prickling legs experimentally. "Nope." he replied, certain they would not bear his weight. He could barely lift them with his watery muscles, and the throbbing in his feet was starting to sharpen into hot pinpoints where the thorns and cactus needles had stabbed him. He was almost sure he was dreaming, so unreal was the appearance of the world around him, so unexpected his situation. Everything was bathed in silver starlight, which poured down from overhead in sheets and curtains, and where the world was not silver it was black, and everything grew sharper and sharper until he felt certain he was looking not at natural desert but at paper cut-outs of an arid setting in some elaborate scale-model. Then, of course, there was the fact that the Master was carrying him on her back, and that her hair smelled so sweet was so soft against his cheek, and her body so warm and so . . . normal. He had always thought she should be cold to the touch, like a statue, like a monster. He tried to ignore the pain in his feet, the weird tingling of his muscles as the narcotic wore off, tried to pass it off as phantom pain that he could feel through the vast depths of sleep in this dream, this strange and uncomfortable dream in which the Master was not at all wicked, but in fact very kind, carrying him across miles of desert to spare his injured bare feet.

Certainly, this was a dream, this peaceful and companionable moment merely a figment of his imagination, the sensory details only drug-induced embellishments, instituted just to make waking all the worse for the loss of the dream.

Adric shut his eyes and leaned his heavy head against his guardian's neck and tried not to wake up.


	9. Hearts in Jars

Adric  _must_ have fallen back asleep at some point; how else, if he hadn't, could he be waking up? Logic dictated that he ought to feel rested, but logic had very little to do with the situation. The moment he opened his eyes, he wanted nothing more than to close them again, and would have, if it hadn't been for the extremely annoying noise. It sounded a lot like someone repeatedly calling his name, and was accompanied by the sensation of someone shaking him by the shoulder. For some reason, everything was blurry and indistinct, and his head felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

The shaking stopped, and the noise changed to a less insistent grumble. Adric shut his eyes and began the slow, fluffy descent back into slumber.

And then someone slapped him across the face.

"Ow!" he cried, putting a hand to his cheek. It stung like nothing else, and continued to do so for minutes afterwards. Had he been able to see himself in a mirror, he would have been dismayed to see that the stinging sensation was accompanied by a comically distinct pink handprint.

"Took you long enough." someone said close-by. Even though the feminine voice was still rather distorted by his sleepiness, he could infer that it was the Master's. "I was beginning to think I'd overdone it."

"That hurt." Adric said, rubbing his cheek and making an effort to sit up. He was still two sentences behind, as happened occasionally. Someone put a hand on his back and helped him get his torso vertical.

"Good, it was meant to. Here, drink up."

Something cold and threaded was pressed against his lips, and his head was encouraged to tilt backwards. Liquid flowed into his mouth, and some of it had actually managed to get down his throat before he tasted it.

The cold liquid went everywhere, and the Master laughed.

"What _is_ that?" Adric demanded, still trying to spit it out. The world around him had been sharpened to an extreme extent, more than he had thought possible, and everything was suddenly very loud. His entire jaw ached with the bitterness of the liquid he had just ingested.

"You could call it an antidote."

"I call it foul."

"That too. Feeling better? You should be. Now get up, I haven't got all day. We're late as it is."

"Late to what?" Adric demanded as the Master hauled him to his feet.

"You'll see." she promised, and winked at him. "Now march. It's just round the bend."

While they had talked, Adric had been examining his surroundings. He was in a corridor or cavern of some kind, carved roughly from grey stone, brightly lit by electric lamps hung from the high ceiling. The hallway was at least three times as high as it was wide, and the floor was coated with rough grains of grey and tawny sands. The walls were streaked with damp, and the cavern smelled of mildew, and cut metal, and very faintly of burnt fuses. Adric began to get the feeling that there was something terrifically important he was forgetting. It had almost forged its way into his conscious mind when the Master started talking again.

"You may be wondering where we are. Actually, I'm _sure_ you're wondering where we are, so before you even start asking all your stupid questions, I'll go ahead and tell you. I dragged your limp carcass across a mile and a half of bone-dry desert through the middle of the night to get to the massive rock I pointed out to you back at the TARDIS. We're inside that rock now. These caves have been—"

"Must you fill _every_ empty moment with trivial chatter?" Adric demanded, irritated that she had driven his important thought back beyond reach.

"Either _you_ deal with the 'trivial chatter,' as you so tactlessly call it, or _I'll_ fry your brain until it shrinks to the size of a walnut."

"You wouldn't dare."

"Care to put that to the test? You're the only one with anything at stake here. Besides, even if I _were_ bluffing, your arrogant loud-mouthing would be enough to tempt me into making good on my previously empty threats."

"Then what will you use as a mainframe for your TARDIS?"

"The TARDIS's mainframe, you egotistical little bastard. What is it with you and thinking I need a beating heart to run my ship?"

And suddenly all the pieces fell into place. Adric was so stunned that, for a moment or two, he couldn't move. He stood stock-still, staring ahead at nothing, the cogs in his head turning so fast you could almost hear them whirring. His mouth opened and closed noiselessly once or twice, and then he whispered something utterly incoherent. By then, the Master had turned around to see what the holdup was.

"What? What's wrong with _you_ , then?"

Adric swallowed, although his eyes were still fixed on some distant point, and he was still stiff and rigid as a statue. "One heartbeat." he whispered. Suddenly he reanimated, starting with his eyes. They fixed themselves on his companion like two guns acquiring the same target simultaneously, his right arm shot out in front of him as he pointed an accusing finger at the woman. "You're not the Master! You're not even a Timelord! Who are you?"

The woman stared at him in stunned silence for a moment, then put her hands on her hips and regarded him critically, shaking her head, and then chuckled.

"Took you long enough." she said.

" _Who are you?_ " Adric demanded. She wasn't the Master, but she had his TARDIS and answered to his name. She knew about Castrovalva and the block-transfer computation, she knew how to connect him to the Hadron web and how fast his injuries healed, she knew about Nyssa and Tegan and the Doctor, she was on her way to a mysterious rendezvous for which she could not be late, which could only mean—

Adric didn't bother thinking about it anymore. He turned and ran as fast as his feet would carry him, the newly-healed skin protesting against the roughness of the sand beneath them, the dry air scouring his throat and lungs, panic welling up in his mind and heart and blocking out all other feelings.

And quite suddenly, with a jolt and a painful loss of momentum, he was not running anymore, but sitting on the ground, his whole right side aching.

"Now now," a familiar voice intoned from above him, "where are you running off to in such a hurry?"

Adric looked up, and there, his face as wicked as he remembered, was the Master.

The real Master.

"We have lots of work to do." he said, and cackled, in that familiar way that still sent Adric's skin tingling, his glittering eyes boring holes straight through the boy's and into the back of his skull.

"I'll kill you." Adric snarled, gathering himself to leap for the Master's throat, all the hate and anger and fear he had stored up inside him from every encounter with this Master boiling to the surface in a frothing geyser and filling him with such a destructive and violent power as he had never before known. All he wanted was to tear the wicked man before him to shreds, to feel the blood flow over his fingers and watch it sink into the dull, dry sand, to be revenged for all that the Master had done to him, and to Nyssa, and most of all to the Doctor.

"My dear boy, you'll never get the chance." the Master replied, smiling a sharp-cornered smile. Suddenly his beetle-black eyes jerked upward, over Adric's head; then the smile, which had vanished with the movement, returned, tugging on his pointed black beard. "Ah, there you are. Immobilise him, would you, before he hurts himself?" The eyes turned slowly back to Adric. "He is a vital part of my plan."

Something cold touched the back of Adric's neck, and he suddenly could not so much as blink. His eyes were riveted to the Master and there was nothing he could do about it.

"I would have told you," the girl whispered in his ear, "but you never _asked._ "

And at that instant, Adric saw his whole future unfold in front of him like a map: the Master and his accomplice would finish their errand here on primordial Earth, whatever that might be, fix their TARDIS, find their massive power source, and shoot off to terrorise the galaxy as the Master had been doing alone for countless millennia. Worst of all, Adric would be enslaved on their TARDIS, powerless to stem their outflowing tide of chaos and destruction, powerless to escape, until the strain became too much and his mind simply collapsed under the weight of his conscience and the innumerate systems of the TARDIS.

More than anything, right then, he wished he had accepted Fate's uneven hand and died a quick and fiery death when the freighter had crashed to Earth like he was supposed to. At least then he had been alone, and no one would have seen him cry.

The Master laughed, and it didn't seem to bother him that he was the only one who got the joke.


	10. Research Pays Off

The Master had gone, after ordering his young accomplice to take Adric to the 'console room' and get him settled. Once again she had used the nerve disruptor to control his body for him, and he felt so much like a puppet he wondered if he would just fall down limp as a dishrag when she took the device from his neck, and be an inanimate corpse until she decided to make him move again. He wouldn't really have minded all that much.

The 'console room,' as it turned out, was a round cavern about thirteen metres in diameter and about half that high, with a domed ceiling to match the circular nature of the room. In the centre was a podium, on which stood a glowing, misty ball of light, which brightened and dimmed rhythmically, like a very slow pulse.

"I'm going to let you off, now." the girl told him, sounding earnest and very slightly concerned. "Don't do anything stupid, would you? I know how you like to do stupid things when you're under duress."

 _How can she expect me to reply when my entire nervous system is nonresponsive?_ he thought, wishing it were under his control to scowl and clench his fists.

"Okay, then. But you know what'll happen if you try to get away. You don't have anywhere to go, so I wouldn't recommend it."

 _I could go die in the desert,_ Adric thought, and wasn't sure he didn't mean it as a viable alternative.

"All right, here goes."

The cold metal shrank away from his neck, and his whole body tingled for a moment, and he swayed on his feet as he waited for his muscles to reaccept his brain as their control centre.

"You lied to me." Adric slurred, forcing his eyes to focus on her, trying to turn his head to get a better angle. The motion made him dizzy and he had to sit down. "You lied to me." he repeated, more clearly this time.

"Of course I lied to you." she replied, sitting down beside him. She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her arms on them. "You never would have listened to me if you had _known_."

"That's not true." Adric objected, on principle, before he realised that she was right; it was only because he had thought she was the Master that he hadn't tried harder to escape. He had overestimated her power, had even gone so far as to fear her, based on very little concrete evidence.

"Do try to think about things before you say them, Adric. It's very unbecoming to say something and _then_ figure out that it was idiotic."

"What does he _want_ with me?" Adric exclaimed suddenly, slamming his fist into the hard stone floor in a paroxysm of fury. "Why couldn't he just leave me alone?"

"And let the _Doctor_ come and rescue you?" she asked, quietly. "Let's face it, Adric, you'd be dead if I hadn't come for you."

"I'd rather be dead."

"I'm sure you would, but that's not really an option. It's not as bad as it seems."

"How so? I'm going to be enslaved on your stupid TARDIS until the day I die or go mad."

"Who told you that?"

"I made an educated guess."

"You made a biased and very ill-thought-through guess. That isn't at all what the plan calls for."

"Well then, what do you want with me?"

"I personally don't want anything to do with you. You annoy me. The Master is a different matter, but I can't speak for him."

"If I annoy you so much, why have you put up with me all this time? Why didn't the Master come and get me himself?"

"He's a very busy man, and you annoy _him,_ too. I'm sure you'd rather have me annoyed than him."

"Why are you even travelling with him? He's wicked."

"So am I."

Adric snorted and stared at her critically. "Wicked people don't save lives."

"Exactly. I've never saved anyone in my entire life."

"Except me."

"You don't count."

"Why not? Were you under orders to rescue me, just so that I could be tortured and enslaved?"

"You _weren't_ tortured and you're _not_ going to be enslaved. Haven't you been listening?"

"You didn't answer my question."

"Yes, because I'm a very wicked person. Will you leave off? What's your interest in convincing me I'm something I'm not? I know what I am, and I rather enjoy it. What are you, Adric? Where do you fit in to all this?"

"I'm on the Doctor's side."

"I didn't ask whose side you were on. I _know_ that. I asked where you fit into it all."

Adric thought about this. "Bait?" he hazarded.

The Master's companion shook her head. "The Doctor already thinks you're dead. What good would it do us to tell him to come rescue a dead man? Besides, the _last_ thing we want is for the Doctor to show up and ruin everything."

"Then what?" Adric demanded. "What am I here for? You should know better than I."

"Ooh, such proper grammar. Why can't you talk like a human being?"

"I'm _not_ a human being, I'm an _Alzarian_ being _._ "

"Descended from Marshmen. It's all right, you can gurgle a bit if you like, get in touch with your roots, your heritage."

"I am _not_ descended from Marshmen!"

"Good grief, I know more about your history than _you_ do. Did the Doctor never tell you? He and Romana figured it out very quickly."

"What do you know about Romana?" Adric demanded hotly, leaping to his feet. Immediately he wished he hadn't, because the Master's accomplice just sat where she was and stared at him, waiting for the blush to rise to his cheeks, which, obligingly, it did.

"I've done my research, Adric." she said quietly, regarding him in a disconcertingly compassionate manner. "I know what you've been through."

"You have no _idea_ what I've been through." he growled, wishing his eyes would stop filling up with tears at stupid moments like this and that his throat would calm down and stop constricting on him. Besides all that, he was beginning to get a headache, and it felt like it was going to be a _monster_.

"I know you almost saved Varsh, and it killed you that you didn't." she said, still watching him, perhaps gauging his reactions. "I know how useless and abandoned you felt when Romana and K-9 left, how guilty you were over the deaths of Nyssa's parents, and how much you wanted to stay on Trakken with her. I know how much Tegan annoyed you, and how the Doctor ignored you, and how betrayed you felt when the Master took control of Nyssa and tried to have her kill you. I know how scared you were when the Master captured you and turned you against the Doctor when he was at his weakest, and I know you resented the Doctor ever after for never even acknowledging all you did to save him. I know the only reason you stayed with him, for a long time, was because Nyssa was there, although even she tended to ignore you in favour of the Doctor. I know how much you wished things had turned out differently, how you tried to prove yourself to the Doctor and he never really noticed. And I know how deep it hurt you that the Doctor never came back for you. I've been watching, Adric. I _know_ these things."

"You don't know—"

"Oh yes, and you're in love with Nyssa."

Adric's skin positively _boiled._ "I am _not_ —"

"Maybe you haven't realised it yet, but you are. And what did I tell you about thinking things through before you say them?"

"Why can't you just leave me _alone?"_ Adric cried, turning his back on her in the hopes that she would miss the trails of moisture that had suddenly leapt from his eyes and slid down his cheeks. "Haven't I been through enough?"

"More than enough." she replied, in pacifying tones. "So have I. So has _everyone._ But here you are, in the midst of a terrible situation, and you can't think of a _single_ thing to do other than _give up?_ Honestly, I thought you had more spunk in you than _that_ , but apparently not."

"You don't think I've thought about it?" Adric said, still not daring to turn around.

"No, I don't."

"I have. There _is_ no way out."

"I really don't think you've thought this through."

"Why are you doing this?" he demanded, fists clenching by his sides. "Why are you trying to . . . to get me to escape?"

"Did it never occur to you to _ask_ what the Master wanted you for?"

"I did!"

"No, you asked what _I_ wanted with you."

"You said you couldn't speak for the Master!"

"Yes, I did. I didn't say I wouldn't _tell_ you what he has planned."

Adric gritted his teeth and tried to resist punching her. She always won those fights, somehow or other, and his head was really starting to hurt, a sort of throbbing ache that grew worse with every heartbeat.

"Then what does he have planned?"

"I'm glad you asked. He's going to transfer your mind to an electronic chip, replace the original mainframe of the TARDIS with it, and keep your body in cold storage until the one he's got runs down."

Adric said something very foul and spun around to stare at her in disbelief and horror.

"Well, maybe, but it sounds rather uncomfortable. Besides, wouldn't it hurt the goat?"

"This isn't the time! It's not funny!"

"I thought it was funny."

"He's going to _kill_ me."

"Haven't you heard a single word I've said? The point is to _not_ kill you."

"He's going to make me into a computer chip and steal my body! What part of that _doesn't_ qualify as enslavement?"

"Because you'll be a computer chip and he's not very well going to have an emotional teenage boy who's loyal to the Doctor running his great powerful fifth-dimension space-time craft, now is he? He's going to leave off the emotions. And the conscience. It'll certainly make your life a lot simpler."

"I won't be a _person_ anymore."

"That's rather the point, yes."

"I'd _rather_ be dead!"

"Then run off into the desert and die." she said sharply, finally joining him in standing. "The door's right there. Go on, I'm not stopping you. Run off like the little coward you are and die a coward's death. It's not like anyone's keeping track. You don't have anyone to impress here. Nyssa already thinks you've died a hero's death, so what's the point in trying to keep up the ruse? Go on, go! No one's stopping you!"

For a moment or two, they just stared at each other, the Master's apprentice pointing furiously to the door, Adric red-faced and angry, his fists clenched. Slowly, the anger and the blood drained from Adric's face, and the Master's apprentice put her arm down.

"What's your name?" Adric asked simply, realising he didn't actually know.

"Tiffany." she replied, and stuck out her hand. Hesitantly, Adric shook it.

"And why are you trying to help me, Tiffany?" he asked. The name tasted funny, after so long referring to this girl as 'the Master' in his mind.

"Because no one deserves to be turned into a computer chip and have their body stolen. Even someone as annoying and arrogant as you. Besides, you're even more annoying when you're depressed, if that's possible."

"Thanks." Adric said, not sure if he meant it or not.

"My pleasure." Tiffany replied, tea-coloured eyes glittering, mousy brown hair framing her face. And she smiled, which was nice. "And you can let go of my hand now."


	11. Peculiar Conversation

Tiffany looked at the round device on her wrist again. "Oh, damn." she said mildly. "I've got to be going if I want to make it back to the TARDIS before morning."

"You're going back?" Adric said, still blushing over their awkward handshake. He stuffed his right hand into his pocket with the air of someone putting a paper bag over their head. "What for?"

"To bring it back here, of course. Can't very well be lugging great heaps of machinery over that distance."

"But it won't run." he objected. "It's as good as ruined."

"Actually it's not." Was that a blush he saw rising into her cheeks? "I purposely threw off the coordinates and told you it wouldn't run because I had to make sure you didn't have a way to escape. I couldn't very well leave it lying about where you could hop in at any moment and be gone in the blink of an eye, now could I?"

"So you dragged me across the desert for no reason?"

"Do you ever listen to _anything_ I say?" Tiffany demanded, exasperated. "I had to make sure you couldn't escape."

"But you didn't have to drag me through all those spines!"

"Yes, actually, I did. Otherwise you would have just run back to the TARDIS and flown off. And it got you to take the narcotic, which saved you a lot of pain and me a lot of whining."

"So it was all an elaborate trick."

"And not particularly elaborate, at that. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to be going. Be back in . . . oh, probably five minutes."

"But you said you wanted to reach the TARDIS by—"

"It's a time-machine, you nincompoop." she scolded, tugging on a strand of his black hair. "Bye! Oh, and I wouldn't recommend trying to escape while I'm gone. The Master will be very, very angry if you try, and he's not completely wedded to the idea of keeping you alive, if you get my meaning. Toodle-oo!"

"But, if you go and get the TARDIS and bring it back to five minutes from now, it won't be there when you go to get it."

"What?" Tiffany said, turning around. She was almost at the door, but was so puzzled by Adric's statement that she had to stop a moment and think about it.

"Well, if you go and get it by the morning, and then bring it back here five minutes from now, it won't be out there in the desert when you go to get it, it'll be here."

"Yes, it will be here, but it will _also_ be out in the desert. It's a fifth-dimension craft, Adric. It really can be in two places at once."

"But—"

"It's time-travel. Do you really expect it to make sense? It's based entirely in quantum physics. Its very _existence_ is nonsensical."

"But I don't see how—"

"Would you shut up? My God, you can't make the world make sense just by _arguing_ about it. Reality isn't a calculus problem."

"Quantum physics is based entirely in maths."

"Oh, _maths._ You see, Adric, the trouble with maths is that they all take place in some fictitious universe where everything is always absolutely perfect. They don't really _apply_ , see?"

"Physics _is_ applied mathematics! It translates directly from calculus!"

"Then why do scientists have a margin of error?"

"Because nothing is perf— . . . oh."

"You see? I'm always right, so you needn't bother arguing about it. Even when I'm wrong, you must never, _ever_ rub it in, because if you do, you'll be sleeping on the couch for the rest of our acquaintance."

"On the what?"

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, never mind. Stay here, and for God's sake don't _touch_ anything. Be back in a few. See if you can stay out of trouble for that long, would you? If you last five minutes it'll be a record, I'm sure. Now, I'm leaving, and if you interrupt me again, I'll put sand in all your food from now until the day you die. Okay?"

"O-okay."

"G'bye, then!" And she strode out the door.

Adric took the opportunity to examine his surroundings more thoroughly. He walked the perimeter of the room slowly, running his hand along the rough-hewn stone of the wall, searching for hidden exits and alcoves, and just generally getting the feel of the place. He kept one eye on the glowing orb in the centre of the room, thinking there was something extremely familiar about it, and entirely unable to place what it was. Once he made it around to the single entrance to the room, his brain was nearly itching with the effort of recollection. _Maybe,_ he thought, _if I examine it more closely, it will come back to me._

He crossed the room slowly, hesitantly, expecting Tiffany to come through the door at any moment and scold him for touching things, or _thinking_ about touching things, or _looking_ like he was thinking about touching things. He certainly was thinking about touching the pearlescent orb, but he would never let on that he was; he knew it was a bad idea and he didn't particularly care.

The orb sat on a pedestal of what appeared to be wrought iron, an ugly system of supports that looked like post-modern spiderwebs. These were hammered into the rock beneath, which was in the form of a sawn-off stalagmite, sitting in the centre of the room like some sort of hub for this gigantic hemispherical wheel of a cavern. The ball hummed gently with the mechanical whirr of cooling fans, rather like an old Earth computer thinking seriously about some complex operation. Adric stared into its depths, dark brows furrowed in concentration, the white light of the orb reflecting off his black eyes. Carefully, he reached out one hand and touched the very tip of his finger to the surface of the orb as gently as he possibly could. The mist inside swirled around the point of contact as though investigating, and a few trails of pink and green wound their way up to the surface.

"Biometrics," Adric murmured to himself, finally remembering where he had seen such a thing before. "This is a biometric orb."

"Well spotted." came a voice from behind him. He whipped around and nearly knocked the sphere from its iron pedestal, turning back to catch it when he saw it falling in his peripheral vision. "And here I was, thinking you could go _five minutes_ without fiddling about with anything."

"Tiffany, I—"

"Oh, shut up. Yes, it's biometric." She walked over to stand next to him by the orb, her own eyes catching and reflecting its light. "It's also incredibly fragile and the only one of its kind, so you're lucky you didn't break it. Hello again, by the way. Been a while, hasn't it."

"So you. . . ."

"I went and got the TARDIS and I brought it back here. Waved to myself on the way in. That probably isn't good for the timeline, but it's just so much fun."

"Why is there a biometric orb on Earth one hundred and forty million years before the birth of mankind? Did some other intelligent species inhabit this planet?"

"Intelligent?" Tiffany inquired, raising an eyebrow. "Psh, there's _never_ been intelligent life on Earth."

"If Tegan is anything to judge by." Adric said, before he could stop himself. To his immense surprise, the Master's apprentice laughed.

"I can only _imagine_ what would happen if she heard you say that. You would be up the creek without a paddle, my friend."

The word struck Adric like a physical blow. _Friend?_ He wasn't sure he'd ever had friends. _A_ friend, even. Certainly he'd had an acquaintance who did more than just tolerate his presence. Maybe. Depending on your frame of reference.

"Hello-o, Earth to Adric, come in, Adric! Anyone home?"

He realised that a hand was being waved in front of his face. "Wha—? Oh. Sorry."

"Hypnotised by the shiny orb? Don't worry, it tends to happen to the weak-minded."

"No, I just . . . I was thinking about my friends."

Again, she raised just one eyebrow. " _You_ had _friends?"_

"No." he replied, looking away into the depths of the orb. "That's what I was thinking about."

He heard an exasperated sigh, and Tiffany put a hand on each of his shoulders, turning him to face her. He was forced to look into her eyes, which always made an embarrassing flush rise to his cheeks. And then, of course, because it was embarrassing, it got worse, until he was red to the tips of his ears.

"Look, Adric. I am only going to say this _once_ , and if you let on _at any time_ that I said it, I will paint your fingernails pink and braid your hair and tie off every single braid with a little pink bow."

"How evil of you." he said, sarcastically, although he could feel his blush spreading downwards across his neck and up across his hairline.

"You have no idea. But listen, really. People find you annoying, and I don't blame them. But that doesn't mean they don't _like_ you. And even if they don't like you— which I wouldn't blame them for, either, I can see how it would happen—"

"Is this supposed to make me feel better?"

"Shut up and let me finish, you ridiculous creature. What I'm trying to say here is this: friends don't have to like you, and they don't have to enjoy being around you. But in essence a friend is someone who looks out for you, who doesn't let you fall behind, who comes looking for you when you've been hurt. A friend is there for you when no one else is. Now tell me this, silly boy: when has Tegan, or Nyssa, or the Doctor _ever_ purposefully left you behind? When have they ever refused to help you? When have they ever not been there for you?"

"You mean like when they abandoned me to die on that freighter?"

"They were going to come back for you, you know." she said quietly, refusing to look away from him. Again he was struck by the fact that she was shorter than he was. He was beginning to learn what the expression 'larger than life' meant in practical terms. "There was a Cyberman aboard the TARDIS and they had to kill it. Once it was dead, the Doctor tried to get to the freighter, only he was a few seconds too late."

"And after that it was too dangerous for Tegan and Nyssa, yes, all right, fine."

"No, _not_ fine. For weeks those two women were harassing the Doctor non-stop to go back and get you. _Both_ of them."

"Tegan? Tegan wanted to go back for me?"

"She was very clear about that, yes. She got into a raging row with the Doctor not too long after. It was worrying, really."

"Wait, how did they kill the Cyberman?"

"Oh. Er. . . ." She looked away.

"He used the badge, didn't he."

"Um, yes. Yes he did. To great effect, I might add."

"Is it broken?"

"Thoroughly."

Adric sighed. "Yes, well. I rather intended for him to use it that way."

"It was just a badge, Adric."

"It was a lot more than that."

"It only meant anything on Alzarius, which is in a completely different universe, may I point out."

"It meant something to _me._ "

"Look at it this way: it was an extremely effective weapon against the Cyberman, saving all three people aboard, and therein served a much greater purpose than it would pinned to your great orange pocket. Besides, it looked rather stupid."

"It was an excellent lock picking tool."

"Always knew you were born a criminal."

"I was _not._ "

"Then why, pray tell, do you know that your badge was an excellent lock pick? How would you know unless you had been picking locks?"

"But I didn't break into places to _steal_ things!"

"No, I imagine that was rather an afterthought. By the way, your left hand has snuck something into your pocket. I don't know what it is, but I would bet money it isn't yours."

Adric's hand clenched on the object in his pocket. It was none of her business what it was, but telling her so would only prompt her to take it out of his pocket and examine it thoroughly.

"Look, why is there a biometric orb in this room?"

"To contact the power source." Tiffany replied, finally removing her hands from Adric's shoulders. "It can be a bit finicky."

Adric was about to ask five questions in rapid-fire succession when the Master strode in through the door.

"Tiffany, get him back to the TARDIS and get to work adapting the circuitry for the transfer. See if you can't use him to speed up the process. We have company."

" _Company?"_ said Adric, before Tiffany could clamp her hand over his mouth. The Master's eyebrows twitched.

"Oh yes. Your dear friend the Doctor has come to throw a spanner into the works."

"Oh, hell." said Tiffany, and dragged Adric off before he even had the chance to ask what a spanner was.

 


	12. Decision Time

"You've been awfully quiet," Tiffany commented as she looked up from the controls. Adric was statue-still, looking up at the web without seeing. "Something wrong?"

He barely heard her, and decided it wasn't a question worth answering, anyway.

 _The Doctor._ The Doctor was here, or would be, soon. The Doctor and Nyssa and the TARDIS. They could save him, rescue him from the Master, and how happy they'd be, to know he was alive after all. And he could only imagine the guilt on the Doctor's face when he found out he could have saved Adric after all, and maybe _finally_ he would listen. . . .

"Earth to Adric? Hel- _loo!_ Anybody home?" Someone was waving their hand in front of his face.

"Stop it." he said, catching her wrist in his hand and shoving her away. Her wrist was so thin, so delicate— how had she ever overpowered him?

"Look, I can understand if you don't want to go back in the web. I wouldn't. But you needn't—"

"It isn't that." he interrupted.

"Ah. It's the Doctor, then. You won't see him, Adric, or encounter him. He won't get that close, and even if he did, it's my duty— my job— to keep you here. I can't let you get free." She paused, chewing on her lip. "Not yet, anyway."

The hint was lost on Adric. "I'm not going into the web."

"Yes you are." Tiffany replied, all the compassion— but not the gentleness— gone from her voice. "You're going to go up into that web of your own free will, because if you don't, I won't help you get out of being a computer chip. And before you ask, it's because _if_ you escape, I will die."

"You—"

"He hasn't said as much, but I know he'll kill me. It's his way."

"Why are you . . . why do you follow him?"

"Because it's my way, too." Her eyes sparkled like shards of coloured glass. "Now get in the damn web."

He would have disobeyed, would have fought her, had he not so many unanswered questions, questions only Tiffany herself could answer. So silently, shoulders slumped, he climbed onto the lift and waited for it to rise, steeling himself for the inevitable shock of integrating with the TARDIS. _It can't,_ he consoled himself, _be worse than this blasted headache._

The lift began to rise with its customary agonizing slowness, letting off a pneumatic whine which pierced the calm thrumming quiet of the TARDIS. Far too soon, Adric was staring into the web, and fearing it in spite of himself. Before Tiffany could tell him to, he stepped up to the web, turned his back to it, and waited. Although he could bear the pain of its charged strands burrowing into his wrists and feet, he could not look at her while they did. So he shut his eyes and winced, and waited to become part of the machine. No one was coming to save him.

Not now. Not ever.

The strange thing was, as his consciousness spread through the fractal-like strings of systems and subsystems, his headache just _vanished._ It was as though the machine had taken his pain and put it away somewhere, or that— and this was a worrying thought— his mind had _needed_ the extra input from the TARDIS to be whole. It was as though he had stepped out from a tiny room with spinning walls and a tilted floor into a calm autumn day. He never wanted to leave.

"That's odd," he heard Tiffany comment— possibly to herself, because she didn't elaborate.

"What is?" Adric asked, more alert and energetic than he had been in days.

"Well," she began, and paused, putting a hand on her hip. "I'm not entirely sure."

"Is something wrong?"

"I don't _think_ so. She's doing a full systems check. Everything's online and running on standby." She turned and glared at him piercingly. "Are _you_ doing that?"

"No. I don't even—"

There was a soft chiming sound, and a text box appeared on Tiffany's console, glowing a pleasant blue. She turned back to read it, and Adric snuck his mind over to peer at it from inside the console.

_SYSTEMS CHECK COMPLETE: All Systems at 100% Efficiency._

"What the Hell?" Tiffany muttered, reading the notification. "That's not possible."

With a slight mental twitch, Adric checked. "Well it's got to be, because it's true."

"No, it's not _physically_ possible, because some of the systems override each other, so if one of the pair— or trio— is at one hundred per cent, the other one _can't function_. Something is wrong."

"It isn't." Adric insisted. "It didn't say they were all _running,_ it said they were all at one hundred per cent."

"That's _not possible._ " she pressed on. "Unless we happen to be in a perfect frictionless vacuum and the wires all have zero mass and zero resistance, which I really doubt, some energy must be being lost _somewhere._ "

"Maybe it's a rounded estimate."

"Shut up, you fat, stupid bastard, and figure out what the Hell is wrong with my ship." she snapped, scrolling through the pages of systematic readouts, trying to spot the source of the problem.

"But what if—"

"No 'buts,' no 'what ifs,' no clever solutions." Tiffany said in a voice of restrained annoyance. "Just do what I tell you, and for the love of God, stop talking."

 _One day, someone's going to learn to listen to me,_ Adric vowed, picking through each system carefully, turning every stone to look beneath. _The Doctor never listened, and look where that got_ _him._ _Dead, or nearly. And now she's going to pretend I'm an idiot, too. Thinks I'm too stupid to know what's going on in my own head. . . ._

But it quickly became evident that something really was wrong. The TARDIS was jumbled inside, confused and hazy. Its sensors were reading information that simply wasn't there, and the conclusions it was drawing from those readings were nonsensical. It was as though the TARDIS was feverish, or . . . or _drunk._

"It, um . . ." Adric began. "Its sensors are all scrambled. And it's extrapolating strangely."

"Aah," Tiffany said, as though the problem had been suddenly reduced to one already solved, "I should have known. Shut everything down."

" _Everything?_ But that—"

"Adric," she warned. He saw her shoulders tense as she fought to stay calm.

"That includes life support." he pointed out anyway.

"Do you want to know what's supporting _your_ life right now? My patience. And there is _not_ a lot of it left. So shut the God damn ship down. Now, please."

Wordlessly, Adric complied. The ship went dark, and eerily silent, and the air seemed to already be going stale. It was very cold up in the web, and Adric fought to keep from shivering. Part of him was in a panic, thinking that ninety per cent of his brain and body had just died, and he didn't want to be reminded of how fragile his flesh-and-blood body was, of how alone he had suddenly become.

"All right up there?" Tiffany's voice came through the darkness like the brief sweeping beam from a lighthouse.

"Fine." Adric replied. His headache was coming back, too.

"It won't take long. We have to give her enough time for everything to cool down."

Adric waited for a moment. "Why?" he asked; since there was nothing else to be done, he didn't think she'd be _too_ angry with him for asking questions.

"She overheated. It happens from time to time, especially when the Doctor's TARDIS comes around. They're cut from the same cloth, you see, and when they get too close together, they try to be the same ship, and it bothers them that they aren't. The strain of staying separate tends to overwhelm this old girl sometimes. It's like holding two very powerful magnets very close to each other without letting them touch."

"I see." said Adric, who almost did. It sounded like quantum mechanics, and if there was anything he didn't need right then, it was something that would make his headache _worse._ "And shutting it down fixes it?"

"No. But it does keep her from overheating again soon. Once the new power source is installed, it won't be as bad."

"Because they'll be less alike, yes? Assuming you get that far."

"Assuming we get that far. Once the Doctor shows up it's anybody's game, really."

"How long have you been working for the Master?" Adric asked abruptly, mostly to take his mind off of his splitting headache.

"Since he escaped the Castrovalva collapse. So . . . oh, about two months."

"Two months? But it's been—"

"Time machine!" she reminded him. He heard footsteps approaching, and then a scrabbling, scrambling sound. She spoke again, only a few feet away from him and slightly out of breath. "There's no reliable way of keeping time in a TARDIS. It's all perception. With all the eyes and ears it has, you'd think it would be easy, but it's not." She paused. "Ever tried to plot projectile motion in an accelerated reference frame?"

"Once. It took me a few hours to solve."

"Well, the TARDIS's temporal reference frame is non-uniformly accelerated. And while projectile motion is in two dimensions, a TARDIS's motion is in five. Beginning to see the difficulty?"

"How is it that you've spent a quarter of the time I have on a TARDIS and know ten times as much as I do about how they work?"

Tiffany laughed, that strange golden sound which was rather more rarely heard than Adric would have liked. "Because _this_ one functions properly, and has accurate and up-to-date data logs."

Bristling, Adric began to retort, "The Doctor's TARDIS is—"

But he suddenly could not continue, because there was a pair of soft lips against his, and a cold hand on his cheek, and warm breath on his face. Just as he figured out what was happening, it stopped happening, and she took a step back.

"Now if you could only learn to shut up," she commented wistfully.

"You're mad." Adric muttered, stunned. "He'll kill you. And then he'll kill _me._ "

"No one's watching." she replied nonchalantly. "Not even the TARDIS. Speaking of which, she's probably cooled down by now. Fire her up, Adric."

He didn't want to. As soon as the lights came on, Tiffany would see how very much he was blushing. He was— dryly— surprised he wasn't glowing in the dark. Moreover, once the lights came on, this moment would be lost forever, and he would begin to convince himself he had dreamt it (although why he would dream of kissing anyone other than Nyssa, he couldn't fathom). But until the lights came on, he could continue dreaming.

"Tiffany?"

"Adric?"

"I. . . ."

"Stop talking, Adric. Entirely. And please turn on the lights, now. If you wouldn't mind."

She sounded tired, unhappy with him for some reason he could not imagine. So, at a loss, he poured forth his mind into the darkness around him and let it wake the sleeping machinery of the TARDIS.

When the lights came back on, Tiffany was at her console, head bent over her work, as though she had never moved.

The first thing he noticed was a distinct duality of purpose, as though the TARDIS had woken with a set idea of what had to be done— this, combined with his own determination to escape back to the Doctor, made him feel very much as though he was trying to be in two places at once. The TARDIS wanted to be with its counterpart, which was very close, while Adric wanted to be as far away as possible. The whole thing made him dizzy, and he blearily thought that this was what a quantum particle must feel like.

"Oh dear, feeling a bit entangled?" Tiffany asked, turning her head a fraction; apparently Adric had spoken aloud.

"What? No, just . . . I didn't mean to. . . ."

She waved a hand dismissively. "So why are you feeling quantum-like, then? Not sure if you're a wave or a particle?"

 _Not sure if I'm a boy or a TARDIS,_ he thought, but that was none of her business. "Forget it. It was nothing."

"Oh well. TARDIS is running swimmingly again. Oh, and, why did you have a bracelet in your pocket?"

Teasingly, she dangled the red and gold metallic bracelet at arm's length, pinching it between two fingers. "It can't _possibly_ be yours. Much too small."

"Give that back!" Adric cried, struggling in the web even though it was connected directly to his nervous system. "That's not yours, give it back!"

"It's not _yours,_ either, now is it. There's no shame in stealing from thieves."

"I didn't steal it! _Give it back!"_

One of the consoles sneezed out a great fountain of sparks, and the lights grew painfully bright. An alarm went off, and black smoke began curling up from beneath the main console. The floor was hot through Tiffany's shoes, and the strands of the Hadron web glowed.

"That's what I thought." she muttered, a smile in her voice. "All right, you can have your bracelet back. I got what I needed."

"And what the Hell did you need?"

"Confirmation of a hunch." She hesitated, half-turning, angling the bracelet so it caught the light. "Oh well. Here. Catch."

The bracelet glittered as it pinwheeled through the air. It seemed to move in slow motion, arcing up towards him, towards the web. . . .

There was a jarring _zap_ , as of an electric discharge, and the trinket vanished in a puff of smoke.

There was no anger, at first. At first there was only shock, and silence, and a tangled, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. When the anger came, it was slow and cold, but heavy as steel, and invincible. It had moved beyond anger, beyond rage. He had skipped fury and gone straight on to hatred, distilled, glassy and sharp. It was a new emotion, so strong he couldn't even find room to be uncomfortable with it.

"Oops." said Tiffany.

"Someday you're going to die." he told her.

"Aren't we all."

"Not like you will."

"Ooh, I'm terrified. Did _Nyssa_ give it to you? Is that why you're upset?"

"Shut up."

"She's forgotten you. As a matter of fact, I don't believe she ever gave a damn about you."

"Shut _up._ "

"I mean, it's not as though she did anything to _encourage_ you. Mostly she ignored you. It's a thankless job, being in love."

"Shut up or I will kill you."

"I'd like to see you try. Really, though, after all you tried to do for her, after all your worrying and devotion, she only really cared about the Doctor."

"I mean it."

"She barely _spoke_ to you. You do realize that, don't you? She _tolerated_ you, that's all. Do you understand what I'm trying to say here? Nyssa didn't love you. _Tegan_ cared more about you than she did. Face it, Adric, you've been wasting your time."

"When the Master comes back, I'll tell him you've been trying to help me escape."

"He won't believe you." But she didn't sound so sure.

"Yes he will."

"Oh? And why is that? You sound awfully certain."

Adric twitched, and on the screen beneath Tiffany's hand there appeared a video, shot from a high corner of the TARDIS, in black and white but with crystal-clear sound. In it, Tiffany stood by her console, looking at Adric with her arms crossed and her head at a quizzical angle.

 _"I can't let you get free,"_ video Tiffany said, and paused to chew her lip. _"Not yet, anyway."_

The video jumped ahead a few seconds with a jerk. _"You're going to go up into that web of your own free will, because if you don't, I won't help you get out of being a computer chip."_ The video fizzed with static, then shut off with a pop. Tiffany had gone very pale.

"You wouldn't." she said. "Without me, you're doomed to a fate worse than death. You'll never escape on your own—"

"I don't care."

There was a moment when the world seemed to hold its breath. "I don't care." Adric repeated. "I think it would probably be worth it."

"This isn't like you. Look at yourself, Adric. You're planning to _murder_ me. What would the Doctor think of that?"

"The Doctor is gone!" Adric snapped. The lights flickered. "The _Doctor_ isn't here and he's not coming back for me. He'll never see this, and he wouldn't _care_ even if he did. He might try to stop me, but it wouldn't matter who I was." He spat. "The _Doctor_ got me killed. The _Doctor_ left me to die on that freighter. The _Doctor_ has already forgotten me." His eyes were black like the depths of space, and a terrible smile wrenched at his face. "The _Doctor_ didn't save me, and he's not going to save you. He shouldn't have left me, and _you_ shouldn't have rescued me. You're going to die, slowly, and so is he. But you first. And I'm going to watch you suffer."

"Oh, God." Tiffany murmured, with an air of realization. "I did this."

She heard the door of the TARDIS seal, watched as Adric took full control of the ship and, one by one, locked her out of all the TARDIS's systems. She didn't even try to stop him. She simply sat down in a corner, hugging her knees to her chest, and stared at nothing.

Adric felt no remorse, no guilt, and wasn't even particularly bothered by it. The Universe had pulled no punches for him, and it was time to start fighting back.

Tiffany first, and then the Doctor. And then. . . .


	13. Dark Places

It had become very quiet in the TARDIS, and Adric was beginning to discover that hatred was difficult to maintain. As soon as the feeling had started waning— about the time Tiffany had started crying— discomfort and guilt leapt into the crack and pried at the hatred like a crowbar. Adric felt sick— sick with guilt, and with hatred, and with all of the muddled things that fell in between them.

"Say something." Tiffany said at last. Her voice was hoarse, but at least she wasn't crying anymore.

Adric said nothing.

"Adric, look, I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the bracelet, and I'm sorry about what I said to you."

"Don't be." he snapped. "It was all true."

"No." she said quietly. "It wasn't. I lied to you."

"Tell me something I _don't_ know."

The quiet came again, so thick it was hard to breathe. Adric was not looking at Tiffany. He knew he would pity her if he looked, and pity was not something he could afford. He had decided on a course of action, and he was going to stick to it.

Even if it was wrong.

"She _did_ like you. I don't know how much, but she _did_ like you."

"Let me know when you've moved past lying through your teeth and have gotten to the groveling stage. I'd like to see that."

"I'm not lying. Not this time."

"You're telling me you _wouldn't_ say anything just to get me to spare your life?"

"Oh, listen to yourself." she muttered, sounding annoyed and heartbroken. "You're starting to sound like _him._ "

"Him who? The Master?"

"Do you know anyone else who regularly talks about sparing people's lives? Of course the Master."

"But you _would_ say anything."

"I wouldn't. I'm not _afraid_ of you. And I'm not afraid of death. I don't want to die, of course, but if I must, I must. Everything dies, everything has its time. Even me."

"I don't believe you. I think you'd get down on your knees and beg if you thought it would make a difference."

"No." she said harshly, and he almost looked at her. "Maybe I would lie. _Maybe._ But I would never, _never_ , bow down and _beg_ for my life. Especially not from you. Look at you! You're a silly little boy with a god complex. Do you know how stupid you look? You're throwing a tantrum, and unfortunately you happen to have the power to kill people while you're at it. You're acting like a child. Wake up, Adric, this is the _real world._ Sure, no one's going to save you from me, and if you kill me, no one will save you from the Master. But you'll have bigger problems than that, even if you don't kill me! Because, listen, Adric, _no one_ is going to save you from yourself. Just look at you! You've thrown away everything you stood for because of a _bracelet._ So yes, I may have destroyed your little token of affection, and yes, I may have destroyed your illusions about the Doctor, and Tegan, and Nyssa. But I'm not the one who destroyed _you._ You're not Adric. Adric didn't kill people. Adric didn't throw fits over trinkets. And, listen, _Adric didn't give up._ Not ever, not even once. So whoever you are, I really hope you enjoy killing me as much as you enjoyed killing Adric. At least you were thorough."

"Nice speech." Adric commented. He had his eyes fixed on the far corner of the TARDIS, as far from Tiffany as he could look. How could he face her? "How long did it take you to write?"

"Exactly as long as it took me to say it. You're so cynical."

"Are you finished, or am I interrupting?"

"I really don't think that should be your main concern right now."

Suddenly the web shut down, retracting into its moorings and dropping Adric to the floor with a thump. Before he could get up— before he could even process what had happened— the cold metal of the nerve disruptor pressed against his neck.

"I am many things, Adric. I am a liar, I am a traitor, I am evil. Sometimes I am even humane. But one thing I am _not_ is stupid." She paused, perhaps swallowing down the viciousness of her past words. "So it looks like I have one up on you."

"How did you shut off the web?" he gasped, only just realizing that, when he fell, the breath had been knocked out of him.

"Manual override. You really didn't see that coming? Oh, wait, sorry, you weren't looking at me. No wonder. Were you afraid of turning back into a normal person? Don't worry about that. Once you've made the decision to kill someone, you're never quite the same."

"So all this— all an act?"

"Oh yes. All of it. I know I said differently earlier, but I really would do _anything_ to save my own skin."

Adric tried to get up, but she pressed the nerve disruptor harder against his neck, as a warning.

"Best you don't move. Not so much fun now, is it, when _you're_ the one being threatened? Oh, but don't worry, because I'm not going to kill you."

She took his hand from his side and wrapped it around the nerve disruptor, then rolled him onto his back and stared right into his eyes. She was smiling, not cruelly, not sadistically, but as if she were, very briefly, happy. And sad. Overwhelmingly sad.

"But you'll really wish I had."

And then she turned the nerve disruptor on.

* * *

 

His whole body ached, inside and out, but the headache was the worst. He could scarcely think, except to think of how much it hurt. He could vaguely recall the sensation of the nerve disruptor torturing him to the last synapse, but that pain was old, and it had gone on for so long that his body refused to believe it could have been real. Nothing that painful could have managed to _not_ kill him. Since he wasn't dead, it could not, therefore, have actually happened.

Bright lights, and the headache got worse, suddenly, like an icepick through each eye. He groaned, and would have covered his eyes with a hand or an arm, but moving hurt.

"What have you done to him?" came a voice, muffled through the cotton that must have been stuffed in his ears.

"Look, I stopped when he went into shock. He was going to kill me."

That voice. That voice made him shiver, made his insides squirm, sent top-priority messages to his brain that something must be done instantly or there was going to be a whole hell of a lot of trouble. He tried to move, but everything was sore and stiff, and moving just made it worse. He moaned and lay still again.

"You could have damaged him. Where would we be then?"

"Exactly where we were before I thought of using him as a basis for our new system, which is to say, still in a fairly good place, just minus one temperamental, homicidal computer."

"Do you think I am some sort of idiot?"

"Of course not. Sorry, sir. On the other hand, it turns out, yes, his emotions affect the system. Unfortunately, to find that out, I . . . er . . . overdid it, I think. But you were right."

"And he threatened to kill you?"

"Oh yes. Very much."

"And you did this to him?"

"Oh, _yes._ With gusto. Sir."

"Hm. I like both of you more every day. Keep him locked up and away from the system for now. Once the Doctor and his . . . _pets_ have been taken care of, we can deal with him. Stay here and keep an eye on him, and try not to get in the way. I have earthlings to enslave."

Footsteps, and then quiet. Adric tried to breathe normally, but he felt like a great weight was pressing down on his chest.

"Keep an eye on him, he says." the second voice grumbled. "Try not to get in the way, he says. Like I'm a _babysitter._ "

"I . . . hate you." Adric muttered, though it caused his whole face to ache.

"I'm glad you found that important enough to tell me, even in your current and may I say pathetic state. Anything else to declare? I wouldn't, if I were you, I'm in a particularly foul mood today."

"I'm not . . . dead." he said.

"Well spotted."

"No. . . . _Adric_ . . . isn't dead."

"Oh." Her voice was strangely soft. "Did I zap the sense back into you, or is this your way of saying sorry?"

He didn't answer. Talking hurt.

"Well, then, I'm sorry, too. This was . . . uncalled-for. But not unnecessary, and you remember that. This is what you get for . . . for whatever it is you did. Trying to kill me. Don't do that again. It isn't nice."

Adric sort of smiled. It still hurt, but he just couldn't help himself.

"And one more thing. Just a question." She leaned in very close, until her lips nearly brushed his ear, and then whispered, "Do you still want my help?"

"No." Adric whispered back. "But . . . I need it."

"That's the spirit." she said, and walked away, turning out the lights as she went.

Even unto the evil, some kindness is given, that they may dispense as they see fit.

* * *

 

Adric slept for most of the next three days, and every time he woke up, he was alone. He had decided, somewhere in his dreams, that trying to kill Tiffany had been not only a bad idea, but just . . . a _bad_ thing _._ Good people didn't commit murder. He didn't want to stoop to the Master's level, and so he resolved that he would not try to kill her again. No matter how tempting it might be.

On the fourth day, he woke up feeling well enough to move again, and so he sat up, slowly. Peering owlishly around the dim medical bay, he noticed that he was, yet again, alone. Apparently Tiffany had a very _laissez-faire_ approach to 'keeping an eye' on him. He swung his feet off the edge of his cot, slowly, worried that his persistent headache would manifest at any moment to cripple him, or that his knees would give out, or that he would pass out and crack his head on the floor. When none of these things happened, or seemed like they were going to, he carefully levered himself onto his feet, expecting his head to spin. It didn't. Apparently he was better off than he had originally thought. He thanked his Alzarian genes and moved on.

It was still very, very dark, and he barked his shin on more than one foot-high solid structure before he found the door. Somehow he managed to muffle his curses entirely, saying nothing, moving as quietly as he could. He put a hand on the doorknob, testing it— unlocked.

"And just where do you think _you're_ going?" someone behind him asked. He froze where he was and bit his lip, wondering how long Tiffany had been in the room, wondering how he could have not noticed. "Never mind, it doesn't matter. If you're well enough to walk, you're well enough to resync, and time's running out. Come on. I think Nyssa might be in trouble."

He wouldn't have gone at all, but for those last seven words. Because of them, he followed Tiffany without resistance, without complaint. It was the last tiny bit of evidence that proved to Tiffany that Adric was not entirely changed by her machinations, and for this she was both glad, and saddened. It would make her life much easier, and his much, much more difficult.

There were times she was tempted to let him become a computer chip, or go back in time and stop herself from rescuing him. There were days when she wished she'd killed him when she'd had the chance, and days when she wanted desperately to set him loose on the universe, alone, in his own personal TARDIS. She knew what kind of pain he would be facing, and only wished she could spare him.

And knew she could not.


	14. Power

Nyssa and Tegan were sitting in the control room of the Doctor's TARDIS, waiting. They had been doing just this for almost an hour, and were entirely sick of it. Neither one had spoken since the Doctor's leaving.

"Well, I don't know about you, but I'm going after him. You know he can't take care of himself." Tegan proclaimed, rising. She straightened her pencil-skirt and strode to the door (as best she could in heels).

"I'll go with you." said Nyssa, rising as well.

"You're not staying with the TARDIS?"

"It can look after itself. Who's going to steal it? The people on board that airplane?"

"Good, then. Let's go."

The TARDIS made a dinging sound just as they opened the door. Nyssa looked back, just for a moment, but saw nothing out of place. She closed the door tightly behind her, wondering if it would lock itself.

It was the last thing she managed to think before the Something got into her head.

* * *

 

"What do you mean, 'Nyssa might be in trouble?'" Adric demanded, following Tiffany through the dark hallways. "Is she or isn't she?"

"She might be. I don't know yet. I haven't had a chance to— look, is there any way you could _stop_ being such a complete idiot? Just for a few moments, that's all I'm asking. Because I've got rather a lot at stake, here, you see."

"Idiot? What about me is idiotic?"

"I'd tell you, but I don't have twenty minutes to spare. Let me put it this way: stop talking and don't start again until I say you can."

"But, you'll never say I can!"

"Damn, you figured it out. I suppose I'll have to find other ways of keeping you quiet for— no, look, really, this is _important._ Lives are at stake, here, so stop distracting me."

"Whose lives?"

"Yours, mine, the Master's, the Doctor's, a lot of innocent Earthlings', mine, possibly Nyssa's and Tegan's. . . . Oh, and mine."

"You said yours three times."

"I'm three times as libel to get killed as anyone here. The Master might kill me, the Doctor might kill me. . . ."

"That's only two."

"I was getting to it. _I_ might kill me if you don't _shut up._ "

"Stop mucking about. Lives _are_ at stake here, if what you say is true."

"I'm not mucking. Now shut up and get in the Web."

"Why? What do you want _me_ to do?"

"I want you to shut up and get in the damn Web. Was I not clear about this?"

"I'm just asking what you want me to do once I'm up there."

"I'll tell you when you're up there. Now _get. In. The Web._ " On each phrase she pushed him between the shoulder blades with both hands, driving him towards the lift that would raise him to the Hadron Web's supercharged strands.

"I still don't see what I can accomplish up here." Adric pointed out as the lift rose. Tiffany's arms were crossed and she was tapping her foot irritably. He knew he probably shouldn't provoke her, but he went ahead and did it anyway.

"Oh, I don't know, Adric. Maybe you could figure out how to grow a common sense lobe."

"That's not a real thing."

"Ha, just because _you_ don't have one. Get in the Web."

"But—"

"Get in the Web or I will beat you senseless."

"If I _already_ don't have any sense—"

Tiffany punched him in the jaw, hard. He stumbled backwards and the strands of the Web caught him, sinking into his wrists, feet, and neck, embracing him like a long-lost friend.

"Now." Tiffany said with a sigh. "Find Nyssa."

Numbers whirred through Adric's vision as the TARDIS sought her out— soon he had visual confirmation of her presence. It took his breath away, to see her again. She was inside the caverns, moving quickly, with purpose. The Doctor was in there. She was going to help the Doctor.

"Found her." Adric said. His voice sounded curiously flimsy.

"Can you tell where she's going?"

He scoured the tunnels and found something he had never noticed before— a box, in a completely isolated little room, deep inside the caverns. Hundreds of Earthlings were tearing methodically at the stone walls surrounding it, but they weren't getting very far. There was some kind of invisible thread connecting the box to Nyssa, and he could see now that she was heading right for it.

"The box." he said. "She's headed for the box."

"What bo— oh. _Oh._ "

"What? What's in the box?"

"Stop her, Adric."

"What?"

"I don't care what you have to do, stop her."

"Why?"

Tiffany sighed. "Because if you don't I'll have to kill her."

* * *

 

Nyssa was lost inside someone's mind— she was no longer sure if it was hers. There was a dense white fog surrounding her, coating the ground in a knee-deep layer so thick and opaque it was almost like water. She was surrounded by hundreds of invisible creatures that stalked through the fog, all of them trying to speak to her at once. She couldn't understand their language, but she knew something urgently had to be done. They guided her steps, drawing her closer and closer to her goal, their voices becoming more urgent as she came nearer. Something had to be done or terrible things were going to happen. More than that she couldn't tell.

Tegan had a hold on her arm and was guiding her through reality, which she could dimly see through the fog and the mass of invisible things. They were traveling through dark stone corridors, empty of life. They were, as far as Nyssa or Tegan could tell, completely alone.

But suddenly someone was standing in their path.

"Adric?" Nyssa said, her voice breaking.

"Nyssa, please, don't go any further. It's dangerous."

"That's not possible." Tegan said, clenching Nyssa's arm. "You're dead!"

"No, I'm not, but that's not important right now. Listen to me, you can't go any farther. You'll be killed."

"I have to." said Nyssa. "I have to go. They need me."

Adric looked puzzled. "Who need you?"

She shrugged. "I . . . I don't know."

Tegan tugged on her arm. "Nyssa, that's not Adric. Adric's _dead._ Let's go, we've got to keep moving."

"Listen to me, Nyssa, Tegan. I'm telling you the truth. If you go further, you will be killed." Adric took a step forward, eyes pleading, hands outstretched. "Please, listen to me."

"The badge!" Tegan hissed. "Nyssa, look at the badge!"

Nyssa looked, and her eyes widened in horror. Pinned to Adric's chest was the blue star badge, whole and unmarked— the silly, gold-plated badge that had defeated a Cyberman, a sharp-edged piece of which hung from a chain around Nyssa's neck. Without a word, she plunged forward, dragging Tegan with her, right through Adric. The illusion seemed to cry out in pain as they ran past, and then vanished.

* * *

 

"No!" Adric cried, sending a jolt through the whole ship. "You idiotic—! It _is_ me, it _is!_ Why won't you believe me?"

"They can't hear you." Tiffany said dully. She was sitting in her favorite napping corner, filing her fingernails. "The projection lost integrity. You'll have to do better than that. Castrovalva was an entire fake city. You could touch it, walk around in it. . . . And now you're letting them walk right through you? You're rusty."

"Shut up!" Adric snapped. "Just shut up!"

"No. You see, isn't that annoying? Now you know how _I_ feel. Why don't you try again? And this time don't do something stupid like put the badge on it. Careless."

"Shut up." Adric mumbled again, but he was concentrating too hard to really put his heart into it.

* * *

 

Onward the two women went, by turns each dragging the other. Around the next corner was the visage of a fierce alien life-form, one that had kidnapped Tegan and Adric not too many weeks ago. Tegan quailed, but Nyssa forged ahead, saying, "It's a projection, Tegan! Just like the last one."

It, too, lost its integrity and vanished when they ran by.

* * *

 

"Damn." Adric cursed. He was beginning to fatigue from his efforts, efforts that were doing no good. If he didn't stop Nyssa and Tegan soon, they would both die.

"Scaring them didn't work?" Tiffany asked. "I'm shocked. Maybe it wasn't scary enough."

* * *

 

Not three steps past the vanished monster, another figure appeared. A stone statue, humanoid and misshapen, standing directly in their path, its eyes glowing lava-red, a high-pitched whine emitting from it. Both women paused, wondering whether to duck for cover or continue, unsure if this, too, was an illusion.

"It was destroyed," Nyssa muttered to herself. "The Melkur was destroyed!"

Together, she and Tegan pushed past the thing, which dissolved at their touch into a thick, sticky fluid that slowly slumped to the floor. They started running and did not look back.

* * *

 

Adric howled in frustration, the whole TARDIS shuddering with the force of his emotion. Though his mind was a roiling mess of ideas, theories, hypotheses, he could think of nothing that would slow the two women down, even for a moment. Across the room, Tiffany rose.

"Well," she said, "if you can't stop them, I suppose I'll have to." She fixed her eyes on him, and looked very deeply saddened. "I'm sorry, Adric. I wish there were another way."

She turned from him and walked toward the door, pulling on her black leather gloves, head bent.

"There is!" he cried. Tiffany stopped.

"And what is it?"

"Let me down. Let me down and I'll stop them myself."

Tiffany shook her head. "I can't do that, Adric. I'm sorry. I can't risk you getting away."

"I won't run! Just let me stop them, and I'll come back. I swear it."

"You're a liar, Adric. You can't help it. It's just one of your many charming qualities. But you _are_ a liar, and I can't let you go."

Tears were crawling down his cheeks. He was glad she wouldn't turn around to face him. "Please, Tiffany! I swear, I'll come back. I'll do anything, just let me save them. I'm begging you. Please, let me save them."

She turned, then, and looked upon him with pity in her eyes.

"Why is it, " she said softly, "that I can never say no to you?"

"You'll let me go?"

"You had better get back before the Master does, or we're both dead." she replied, crossing swiftly to the manual shut-off on the Web, which she had ensured was the only way to turn it off. "Remember, Adric, you promised."

"I'll get back as soon as I can." he said, just as the Web dropped him. The lift was still raised, so he didn't have as far to fall, but it still took him a few moments to regain his balance and control over his muscles. Tiffany helped him to his feet.

"Go. Save them." she said. "I'll do what I can."

* * *

 

"It's just round this bend." Nyssa assured Tegan breathlessly as they ran. The beings in her head were frantic with her approach, clustering about her with such a clamor that she could scarcely hear herself think. They rounded the corner and everything, even the beings, stopped dead.

Adric was there again— Adric but not Adric. He was thinner, more ragged; his hair had grown scruffy and looked unwashed; his boots were missing, and there were scars on his feet and ankles from recent trauma; his clothes were dirty and torn in places, and there was certainly no blue star badge pinned to his chest; there were dark circles around his eyes and a darkness within them that seemed impossibly deep. This was a boy who had learned how to hate, a boy who had held the power of death in his hands and was afraid to let go.

He smiled weakly at them.

"'Allo." he said. His voice had cracked, so he cleared his throat and tried again. "Er, he—hello."

"Not again." Tegan said, striding forward. "How many times are you going to try this same trick?"

Adric put out his hand and lightly touched her on the shoulder.

"Tegan. . . ." he said, and stopped, looked past her, right at Nyssa. "I wasn't lying. You'll be killed if you go any farther."

"You're . . . alive?" Tegan said, staring at him with renewed wonder. "How? I mean, you're . . . _alive!_ "

She embraced him, squeezing him so tightly he thought his ribs might break. He could tell she was crying, by the way her breath rattled in and out, by the way her whole body shook. He stood statue-still, unsure of what to do. Eventually, he settled on returning her embrace, albeit with not nearly as much enthusiasm.

"I can't believe it. You were dead. How? How did you survive?" Tegan held him at arm's length, staring at him, demanding. "How did you survive?"

"I . . ." he began, and stopped, looking at Nyssa again. She seemed weak, or at least ill. "Is Nyssa all right?" he asked.

"Oh, God!" cried Tegan, and fairly dropped Adric. She hurried to Nyssa's side. "Are you? What's going on?"

"They're calling. . . . Calling for help."

"Who are?"

"I . . . don't know. In there." She pointed.

"But that's where. . . ." Adric began, and suddenly all the pieces fell together. "The power source is _alive?_ " he whispered.

"What help could _we_ be?" Tegan asked. "What do they want _us_ to do?"

Nyssa shrugged again. "I have to."

Adric took a step closer, halted, chewed his fingernail. "Nyssa, Tegan, you have to get out of here. Go back to the Doctor. Just . . . just get away from here. As far away as you can."

"Right." Tegan replied. "Come on, Nyssa, we're going back to the TARDIS. The Doctor will catch up with us there. It'll be all right, you'll see. Well, come on, Adric!"

He hesitated, looked at the corridor behind him, at the passage down which the power source lay, at the floor, before finally his eyes settled on Nyssa.

"Right," he said, and followed after them.


	15. New Management

Tegan and Nyssa guided Adric back through the labyrinth of caves to where they had left the TARDIS. Nyssa's mouth was a thin line, and she stared ahead of her at nothing as they ran. She seemed to be in pain; but as soon as the doors of the TARDIS closed behind them, she relaxed, slumped back against the wall, and put a hand to her head.

The TARDIS was exactly as Adric remembered it. The white walls, the whirring noises, the soft hum of the engines, even the lemony smell of the cleaning agent the Doctor occasionally splashed on the floors to get the adventure off of them.

"Oh my God," someone said behind him. He turned around and saw Nyssa staring at him as though he were some kind of prodigal son, returned from the dead. "Oh my God, Adric."

"Hi." said Adric. "Um . . . I'm not dead?"

"How?" she asked.

"I was . . . rescued."

"Who rescued you?" Tegan interrupted. Adric didn't even hear her. He had eyes for Nyssa alone, and she, only for him.

"I told the Doctor to go back."

"I know you did. It's all right, though. I'm here now."

"And as soon as the Doctor gets back, we can get out of this place." Tegan said, miffed that the two were ignoring her.

"Yes," Nyssa said, "as soon as the Doctor gets back. It's the Master, you see."

"I know." said Adric, and the darkness came out of his eyes and spread across his face. "I know _all about_ the Master."

"Adric, where have you been? What happened to you?" Tegan demanded, grabbing him by the shoulder.

"The Master rescued me." he said. "Or . . . his assistant."

"The Master has an assistant?"

"Yes. Tiffany. She rescued me."

"Why in the world would the Master rescue you?" Nyssa asked, getting slowly to her feet.

"He wanted to turn me into a computer chip. I've been running his TARDIS for weeks now."

"And he let you go? This is a trap." Tegan said, instantly on alert.

"No, he didn't. And it's probably not a trap. Tiffany let me go. I just had to promise. . . ."

"Well, you're safe here, now. You got away! That's two times you've got away from the Master." Tegan said, and gave up on getting through to Adric. He wasn't even looking at Nyssa anymore. He was just staring at nothing.

Nyssa walked up to him and, quite suddenly, hugged him very tightly. Adric started as though he'd gotten an electrical shock.

"Nyssa--" he began, not quite sure what he was going to say to her.

"Just don't go away again." she said to him, face buried in his shoulder. "Promise me you won't go away again."

Adric sighed and held her tightly, because it was all he could do.

* * *

 

"Where is he?"

Tiffany looked up from her nails. The Master had just strode in the door, looking like a thunderstorm. Tiffany rolled her eyes and went back to filing her nails.

"Where is who?"

"The boy!" the Master raged, indicated the Hadron web. "Where is he?"

"What boy?"

He seized her by the throat, lifting her from the ground. She dropped her nail file, but not her composure.

"Don't you play stupid with me, girl. Tell me where the boy is, or I'll find him myself."

"He has a name." Tiffany croaked. The Master shook her violently, like a wolf shaking a bird to snap its neck.

" _Where is he?_ "

Tiffany smiled, although her neck hurt like hell and her head was beginning to swell up with blood. "Gone." she said. "He's probably a hundred million miles and ten thousand years away by now. You'll never find him."

The Master flung her to the ground with a cry of disgust, and delivered a sharp kick to her ribs. She cried out, and then laughed.

"He's _gone_ , you old fool!" she spat. "And you'll be stuck here forever."

"Insolent brat!" the Master cried. "You will die for this treason!"

Then something hit him over the head, hard. His eyes glazed over and he crumpled, disabled but not unconscious.

Behind him stood Adric.

* * *

 

The Doctor had rushed in, out of breath and grinning. "I traded him a faulty time circuit. Bartered it for the freedom of the prisoners. Turns out, one of them got into the power source and broke it! Whatever was in there is gone now. Dead as a doornail. Anyway, I--" He had caught sight of Adric, who had let go of Nyssa. "My God." The Doctor had rushed over and put both hands on Adric's face. "My God, you're alive. How did you escape?"

Adric brushed the Doctor's hands away with more force than necessary.

"Where were you?" he demanded.

"What?" said the Doctor.

"I said, where the _hell_ were you?"

"I don't--"

"You _abandoned_ me! You left me there to die! You could have saved me. Any time, you could have just gone back and saved me, and you didn't because you _forgot_ about me!"

"Adric, no, it wasn't like that. Please, let me explain."

"No." said Adric, the darkness seething in his eyes. "I don't want your explanations. I don't want to see you ever again. And most of all, I don't want to be like you."

"What?" said the Doctor.

"What?" said Tegan and Nyssa.

"There's someone I have to go back for. Someone I have to save. And I'm not going to forget about her like you forgot about me." Adric turned to Nyssa, some of the anger vanishing from his face, but none of the determination. "I'm sorry, Nyssa. I can't stay."

He hadn't waited for a rebuttal, for an argument. If he let them talk, they would convince him not to go. It was the hardest thing he ever did, walking out that TARDIS door, but he did it, and he didn't look back.

* * *

 

"What the hell are _you_ doing here?" Tiffany demanded, picking herself up off the floor.

"You're welcome." said Adric.

"You were supposed to be _gone,_ you idiot! You were supposed to fly away with the Doctor and never come back! Why did you come back here? What were you _thinking?_ "

"I promised!"

" _You were supposed to lie!"_

Adric stood, stunned and immobile, just staring at Tiffany for a few moments. It was possibly the angriest he had ever seen her.

"I'm . . . sorry?" he said, and then something stabbed him right between the ribs. He screamed and crumpled to the floor, curling in on himself as the air sputtered out of his left lung and the void began to fill with blood. The Master dragged himself to his feet, holding the wicked, bloodstained dagger in his black-gloved hand. He turned his calculating eyes on Tiffany and smiled at her.

"Provided I kill you in the next six minutes," he said, "I can still have my new computer mainframe."

"Go to hell." Tiffany spat, and leapt upon him. She scratched at his eyes with one hand while fending off his dagger with the other. She kicked and bit him, struggling to gain the upper hand. In six minutes Adric would be dead.

And then the Master's hand slipped free of her iron grip, and the dagger stabbed into her stomach, once, twice, three times. She huddled on the floor, crying out in agony, as the Master pulled himself back up. He stomped on her head as hard as he could, and she went still, her life leaking through her fingers where she still clutched her stomach.

The TARDIS lurched.

The Master looked up to see Adric, suspended in the web, his blood hissing as it dripped from his side and encountered the super-charged strands. He appeared to be unconscious, but when the Master took a step towards him, his head snapped up. His eyes were bright and cruel.

"This time," he choked, fluid gurgling in his lungs, "this time you don't get to come back."

The pressure seal around the TARDIS's doors hissed. The look of panic on the Master's face would have been funny on any other day.

"You'll kill her, too!" the Master cried, pointing to Tiffany. "If you do this, you'll kill her too!"

Adric chuckled humorlessly. "She's already dead." he said, and opened the doors to the vacuum of space. He closed his eyes, so he wouldn't have to see Tiffany's lifeless body sucked like rag-doll into that terrible blackness. He could hear the Master scrabbling at his control panels, trying to get a grip on something, anything-- he could hear him crying out, but couldn't make out the words over the roar of the air rushing out of the TARDIS. Finally there was a long scream, and then no sound but the rushing of the air. Adric opened his eyes. He was alone in the control room. He closed the TARDIS doors, and the vacuum gave up its hold on the control room. Adric sagged in the web, letting his head hang.

"I tried," he murmured, every breath an agony as he drowned in his own blood. "I'm sorry . . . I couldn't . . . save you. . . ."

And all was darkness.

* * *

 

And then there was a light. It seemed very far away, and yet somehow, very close. Something touched his face, gently. He opened his eyes, saw a blurry face staring down into his own.

"Tiffany?" he croaked.

"Hi." said Tiffany.

"You're dead." he said. "And so am I."

Tiffany sighed. "Would that it were so. But we're not. We've been saved thanks to my infinite cleverness."

Adric sat up. He was in the TARDIS's medical bay, lying on one of the cold, flat tables that passed for beds. "What happened?" he demanded. "He stabbed you. Three times. I saw."

"Yes, and it bloody well hurt, too. As you should well know. You got stabbed, too."

"But you should've died! You got sucked out the airlock!"

"Obviously I didn't."

Adric stared at her. One side of her face was a single, massive, mottled bruise, but otherwise she looked fine-- a little pale, perhaps, but certainly alive.

"How did you survive?"

"Finally, a coherent question. First, I didn't get 'sucked out the airlock,' as you so delicately put it, because there happened to be a console between me and it. Secondly, while stab wounds to the belly hurt like hell, they generally take several hours to actually kill you, unlike, say, stab wounds to the lungs. I dragged myself down here and had the computer patch me up as best it could, and then I went back for you. Turns out the Hadron web had you in some kind of stasis. You were almost dead, but not quite. So I brought you here, pumped the blood out of your lungs, and waited. For about a day."

"That doesn't make sense." said Adric.

"No," Tiffany admitted, "it doesn't. But it was the best explanation I could come up with." She grinned at him. "I actually have no idea what happened."

Adric thought hard. He could vaguely remember the Hadron web letting him down, and then, perhaps, dragging something very heavy across the floors. . . .

"Are you sure I didn't save you?"

"That's ridiculous." said Tiffany. "The only way out of that web is the manual shut-off."

"Right." said Adric. "Of course."

"But, I suppose, in a way, you _did_ save me." she said, staring at something in the far corner of the room. Adric felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth.

"Even though I wasn't supposed to."

"No, you weren't." She faced him, completely serious. "Why did you come back for me?"

Adric thought. "Because . . . I just had to."

"You're ridiculous." she said, but then she smiled at him.

"So!" she said, rising and stretching. "Here we are, out in the middle of the universe, with a faulty time-circuit, an inadequate power source, and an outdated computer mainframe. What shall we do?"

Adric hefted himself off the medical bay table, pressing two fingers to the healed wound in his side where the Master had stabbed him. He took a deep breath, and was pleased to find that it didn't gurgle at all.

"I don't know." Adric replied. "But the universe is a big place."

"It certainly is. And the Doctor is only one person."

"The Master wasn't the only threat to the universe." Adric agreed.

"And there's always N-Space." Tiffany pointed out. They looked at each other for a long moment.

"Adric?" said Tiffany.

"Get in the web?" said Adric.

"Precisely."

"Ask nicely."

Tiffany sighed. " _Please_ get in the web."

Adric grinned at her. "Tiffany," he said, strolling towards the exit, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship."

"Yeah." said Tiffany. "Just remember which one of us holds the nerve disruptor."

* * *

 

The planet loomed ahead, beautiful and sapphire blue. They rushed towards it through a tunnel of numbers, coming to rest on a level spot somewhere on the surface. The TARDIS dinged, and Tiffany leapt up from her spot, running towards the doors.

"This is it!" she cried. "The furthest reaches of time and space! I almost don't blame the Doctor for that faulty time-circuit trick. It's made the trip much more interesting."

"Open the door, Tiffany." Adric prompted.

"All right, I'm getting there. It doesn't do to rush these things." Tiffany cleared her throat, and then, flinging the doors wide open, cried, "I present to you--!" And then a cry of dismay.

"What?" said Adric, craning his neck to see out the door. All he could see was red dirt. "Where are we?"

"Adric," said Tiffany miserably, "may I present to you the farthest reaches of time and space: Melbourne, Australia. Earth."

Adric laughed harder than he had in months, and the TARDIS chuckled, too.

It _was_ a big universe, but it also had a sense of humor.

 

**THE END**


End file.
